I participated as panelist at this year’s Journey by Ernst & Young and Globes in Tel Aviv. The panel, which was organized by Eyal Kishon from Genesis was about The Future of Mobile Applications. Everybody agreed that the near term (2 years) primary focus of the industry is with mobile content. Getting it off the ground and further used, through additional services and through fine tuning existing services. It’s the longer term focus that got us puzzled a bit.

I, personally, feel very strongly about 2 future directions for the mobile industry.

The first one is personal entertainment. Phones and MP3/Video players WILL converge eventually and the walled gardens will continue to erode. People will face the need to manage mobile media from a variety of sources and then access it on their mobile in a number of ways. The spaghetti of content (user generated vs. commercial), media types, DRM, standards, media delivery alternatives and business models is guaranteed to produce some very successful start-ups.

The second growth area is with mobile commerce. I do believe that in not so long, I will be able to flag a product a like, scan it’s barcode (or RFID) with the phone’s camera, get multiple price offers directly at my phone, pick one and have it delivered with a click of a button. Oh yeah, I will also get a discount from my operator for making a purchase and settling it through my phone bill.

That’s right,  Operators are about to become the new age retail chains, but that’s not where it ends. I don’t think a Walmart MVNO is a far fetched concept. I happen to think billing relationships happens to be the Operator’s most valuable assets. With Operators turning to supermarkets, it is only natural retails chains will look to level the plain field. And why not? If Walmart offered a sponsored mobile phone and then put on top a discount for purchases made via the phone, don’t you think they have just as good a case as Disney or ESPN?