OK, first things first: Web-On-Cell isn’t a new acronym or standard or catch phrase or anything like that.

I made it up.

But it kind of has a nice ring to it (oh boy, there’s a pun now too)….

What I mean by Web-On-Cell is really two things: one, the growing momentum around using wireless devices to access the Web, and just as importantly, 2) the movement of technologies from the Web world onto the mobile device.

The first trend seems undeniable. There appears to be real interest by users in surfing the “real” Web on a phone.

Enabling trend one, of course, is trend two – better on-phone technologies.

It starts with better Web browsers, which I’ve chronicled previously. Apple, Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla and a slew of other vendors are working to bring desktop-style browsing to the phone.

But it doesn’t stop with Web browsers. Flash Lite is already on the phone; embedded Web-based Flash –which powers YouTube and other Web sites – is on its way as well. Next-generation browsers will also better support AJAX and Javascript, not to mention support desktop plug-ins (such as Firefox add-ons) of all sorts. On the Web, developers have combined all these technologies to create new “widget-style” programming – small, network-driven apps – an app development style that fits well on mobile phones as well. Just today, Yahoo unveiled OnePlace, new bookmark/content sharing application that slides into its Yahoo on the Go mobile widget platform.

Another interesting trend are so-called “off-line” technologies that are now migrating not only to the desktop but to the phone.

Just today, Microsoft announced its Silverlight platform will be included on several Nokia phones. Platforms like Silverlight and Adobe’s AIR make it possible to run rich, desktop-like applications anywhere, anytime, whether connected to the network or not (much the same as Java, of course).

We haven’t even mentioned the Apple iPhone SDK or the Google Android SDK, both of which enable fairly open, Internet-style application development on mobile devices.

In another intriguing offline development today, Google Gears – the technology that enables Google’s Web-based apps to run in a disconnected state – became available for the first time on a mobile device, in this case, Windows Mobile. Telecom blog Open Gardens dug a bit into the Google Gears code to note that the technology can enable lot more than just off-line browsing – including providing location and secure file system access APIs.

And don’t forget GPS-like location enablers, such as Google’s MyLocation or similar technology from Navizon, which use combinations of cell-tower triangulation and other approaches to provide location data to mobile application developers.

The Telco2 blog is noting similar trends, pointing to a Nokia-targeted developer that shortened its app development cycle to three weeks using Web-based development styles. In fact, the whole idea of Web versus native mobile apps seems to be making the rounds in the blogosphere (see: Mobile Applications, RIP and Sounding the Death Knell for Native Mobile Apps).

Slowly but surely – Trojan Horse-style – device-level capabilities and APIs are finding their way into the wireless world. None of these APIs have anything to do with service provider IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) roll-outs, IP-based Service Deployment Platforms (SDPs) or even device-maker OS/deck combos. But bring them together and developers can begin to build powerful, online/offline, location-aware applications.

This is a significant change in the balance of power between the Web 2.0 players and telcos, since you don’t need a special (telco-issued) digital certificate or pre-installation for web applications.

Whether this is a good or bad thing, of course, depends on how wireless service providers are positioned to take advantage of, contribute to and even enable such development trends.

In a few weeks, Verizon will be laying out its open network plans at a developer conference, including not only device requirements but application APIs and capabilities as well. Will those specs dovetail will Web-based mobile developments or work against them?

The answer to that question will start to lay the path – or paths – forward for mobile application developers.

UPDATE: This blog post over at the NYTimes echoes many of the thoughts above and is worth a read:

The Battle Today for What you Can on Your Phone Tomorrow

One of my favorite bloggers in the mobile area is Russell Beattie, formerly of Yahoo’s mobile team among other endeavors and currently creator of Mowser, a mobile search engine/portal/transcoder.

Russell doesn’t suffer (particularly mobile) fools gladly, so he’s a good counterpoint to most conventional wisdom in the Web/mobile areas.

Today, his rant holds special import for service providers, as he lays out Google’s real path to success in the Web search market — and its plans to follow that blueprint in the mobile market.

Beattie seems at least in part inspired by Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, who at the Mobile World Congress this week implied service provider contracts are becoming less important, as mobile users increasingly wanted to browse beyond an operator’s own site:

“The world is changing. Users want an internet without fences. They know how to type in Google.com if they want to get to it. Two years ago the operators were still playing the role of gate­keepers but that is no longer the role for them.”

The idea that Google’s search growth happens serendipitously, either on the Web or on mobile phones, leads Beattie to lay it out plainly:

The greatest hoax ever played on the Internet is the idea that Google’s growth was somehow “natural” or “viral”, and that the strength of their search results alone is what propelled them to their insane 70% market share…. Google bought as much search space as they could from OEMs, portals, etc…the reason that Mozilla.org is a going concern and Opera is now free? Because of the search deals they made with Google.

For carriers, the other party in some of those search deals, this is nothing new. But Beattie follows the thread into the mobile area:

They’re doing it again in mobile, and no one seems to be noticing. The first thing I thought of when I read that Google is getting 50x more search traffic from the iPhone than any other phone is “Wow, that default iPhone search deal they made with Apple is really paying off.” Of course all the fanboys don’t bother noticing that and just assume somehow Google would be getting all that search traffic “naturally”. Google might still be seeing a huge percentage more iPhone traffic because of how nice the iPhone interface is than the rest (it is the best mobile browsing experience bar none) but that’s not the significant part. You don’t see Yahoo! or Microsoft or Ask making the same claims, do you? Google’s getting that huge increase in search traffic because they *paid* for it.

So while Google’s hard-ball 700 Mhz open access demands and its still-evolving Android strategy look like they’ll succeed in helping to “open” up the Web, don’t miss its deals that essentially “lock down” large portion of the search market — Web and now mobile — for itself.

Look no further than this week for more proof it its pay-for-play strategy in action as it managed to get the Google search engine embedded as part of Nokia’s search application.

For mobile operators, this means one thing (if it wasn’t already obvious). You have something Google — not to mention Microsoft and Yahoo, or Microsoft/Yahoo) — need, and need desperately.

Don’t get so distracted by the man screaming “OPEN!” behind the curtain that you give away the prize he is really looking for, prime mobile portal and search engine placement.

Be it large upfront fees or good terms on an ad share deal — make them pay.

UPDATED: Here’s some good additional info from Chris Sacca, who used to manage Google’s wireless business (ie–strategy and lobbying) but left recently to go the VC route. Sacca notes that browsing by searching on the iPhone is probably quicker than desktop-style URL entering given a) the hard-to-use iPhone keyboard interface and b) Google query box built into the iPhone “chrome.”

Here’s the trick to playing the “open” game. It only really works if you absolutely dominate and make boatloads of money in a market sector that is NOT open. It’s a close cousin to the “free” game — you only give away razors if you’ve got razor blades to sell.

For Google, its success in generating billions of dollars via its low-friction search and Web advertising engines means that it can afford to “give away” mobile operating system code or support an “open” approach to social media widgets. By virtue of its market share in online advertising, it is already the *de facto* “owner,” or more accurately, the biggest beneficiary if such “open” approaches take off.

Going “open” from a position of strength is also a wonderful way to undercut competitors. In Google’s case, it’s open widgets across the Web vs. open widgets on Facebook and open (and no license-cost) mobile OSs vs. vendor-specific mobile OSs (from Symbian to Windows Mobile to Apple iPhone, etc).

In the telecom space, the balance of power equation for the Open Handset Alliance is as follows: Google can 1) try to negotiate their way onto mobile carrier decks ;2) pursue a viral, off-deck distribution strategy to encourage users to download Google apps to their current phones; or 3) it can try to change the rules of the game to better suit its own needs.

But the ultimate question is: are offerings like OpenSocial and Open Handset Alliance — not to mention offerings such as free-on-the-Web Google Apps or the recently-released IMAP features on Gmail (a capability most email providers charge for) — really “free” if they are tied, even loosely, to Google’s advertising engines, revenue streams and ambitions?

With a stock price over $700 and a market cap that places it in the top 5 (!) of all companies, Google is not in a position to be altruistic (or in Google parlance, “not evil”). They are in a position where they need to give the street good news every 120 days to keep its stock price steady or moving up.

Or as one enterprising blogger wrote following Google’s recent wave of “open” announcements (I can’t find the link, but I’ll add it when I do): when is Google going to “open up” its core search algorithm? I’m sure it would be great to have a slew of applications enabled by open access to that technology….

In the spirit of that query, here’s ten questions we’ll be looking to see answers to as Google’s “open” efforts play out over the coming months, with a focus on the Open Handset Alliance:

1. What specific apps or features will the Android platform enable that other modern mobile OSs cannot?

There was a lot of talk about applications and features you “can’t get on a phone today” but there are vibrant third-party developer markets around Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and mobile Java — not to mention that the Apple iPhone SDK will be arriving soon too. Android’s major differentiator would seemingly be: an unfettered development community — but whether that happens or not is a function of ecosystem-forces and that makes it a wait-and-see.

2. If Web apps are so great, why are you also delivering a virtual-machine based runtime environment?

Google talked about a desktop-grade browser in Android and that’s obviously important to fulfill its larger Web-driven goals. But it is also delivering an SDK that will let developers write apps to a “custom VM.” That makes this very similar to Sun’s mobile Java play — open tools, write once-run anywhere apps, etc. So with the iPhone already delivering the Safari Web browser and Java-based phone delivering a VM-based run-time, this isn’t a completely new style of phone app development but rather an alternative one.

3. Who gets to keep the advertising revenue?

Google’s Eric Schmidt made a point of saying the best partnerships in the mobile area will result in all the players sharing advertising revenue — but the devil is definitely in the details here. If Google becomes a strong ad partner with fair terms carriers may be willing to jump in bed with them. If not, carriers are going to want to continue to control on-deck real-estate. Unbelievably (literally, I don’t believe it), Google execs downplayed the advertising angle: “You won’t see a completely ad driven cellphone based on this platform for some time,” Google’s Andy Rubin said. Yes, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t an advertising play at the end, plain and simple.

4. How important is open source for a consumer-facing OS?

Linux has been around forever. Where is the market-changing consumer version of Linux today? Ubuntu? Great software, no market share. Developers write to platforms with market share, plain and simple, open source or not open source. Open source represents a relatively new and occasionally successful business model for attaining market share. But it’s not a guarantee.

5. If Android can’t get distribution, then what?

There was an interesting question on the press call about Android potentially running as a “soft-OS” — an interface that could be downloaded and run as an application on non-Android phones. Google seemed surprised by the question and said it was something they’d look into. That would be a tough path to take. So no distribution, most likely, no Android. So watch what AT&T and Verizon do in the U.S. — will they sign-up to deliver Android phones? As for handset-makers, even Open Handset Alliance partners HTC and Motorola said they will NOT abandon other mobile OSs to focus exclusively on Android. Which means the mobile OS market will continue to shake-out but remain a market with *many* options.

6. Where’s the telco route-around strategy — is it coming as a second wave?

An open source mobile OS is one thing, but the bigger disruptive play would have been to NOT partner with carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile but instead deliver a VoIP-driven device that would rely on Wi-Fi, Wi-Max or new 700 Mhz open access spectrum. This is absolutely something that Google’s various moves in the mobile space hint at. So why not pull the trigger? Because you can’t get market share playing that disruptive card today — and Google’s ad business (how it makes money) is all about share and scale. It’s not about being an alternative to the market share leader, nipping at its heels. It’s about being the leader. That’s a daunting goal to fulfill.

7. Will “forks” in the development road doom Android?

There’s a problem with open — you can’t control where it goes. Android represents not only yet another platform, but a platform that can be tweaked in any direction imaginable. Further, the Apache v2 license upon which Android is based allows developers to make forks in the code and not be forced to make that code public. By comparison, Sun made its Java platform open source but maintains a control over core platform specs through a community process. Even Linux has a “core” that is watched over for compatibility reasons. Will there be different implementations or flavors of Android? Will they be interoperable even as they become differentiated? This is not an insignificant issue.

8. Can you win in the consumer mobile space without enterprise mobile products?

Apple has proven that the likely answer to this is yes — people will buy iPhones even if they aren’t formally supported by their IT department at work. But many of us still get our phones — especially our “smartphones” — through work. So that means phones that do not have enterprise device management and back-office support (including Exchange and Office apps support) will never truly “defeat” phone platforms that do. They’ll have to co-exist. Will someone take the open source Android code and build an enterprise back-end management and security suite to go along with a slick, business-focused front-end application stack? Would IT deploy and support it? We’ll see.

9. What about the iPhone?
This is a biggie. Eric Schmidt is on the board at Apple and is a noted iPhone user himself. The way these two innovators have tackled the mobile market is worth considering. Apple released a phone worth salivating over. Third-party application development — the very value proposition that leads Google’s launch — was not only missing from the iPhone launch but Apple purposely broke third-party app hacks (though a formal iPhone SDK is coming soon). And even that didn’t discourage developers from being excited about the iPhone. So forget the open source code and the carrier partnerships and the 700Mhz wrangling, etc. etc. Watch the developers. If developers whip up a frenzy around Android the way they have around the iPhone, Google may have something here.

10. So what would make Android a winner?

This is just one man’s opinion, but what would make me go out and buy and Android-phone next year? Here’s the quick-list: great, innovative, good-looking hardware; a state-of-the-art user interface, at least on par with the iPhone; a simple, over the air application launcher that lets me add whatever apps I want; a killer application or two, either on-phone or downloadable, that will let me integrate and manage all my communications in a way that truly makes sense (btw, I saw a few apps that meet this description at VON last week — more on that later); and, finally, a rich network environment that gives me cheap minutes but doesn’t limit text, email, wi-fi (and voip-over-wifi) or Bluetooth and lets me move seamlessly between modes.