SAN FRANCISCO--Motorola and Lucent Technologies revealed new mobile application strategies at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment, both with the same goal of bringing mobile content to the network but with completely different approaches.

Motorola announced a strategic investment in July Systems, which will supply a mobile storefront creation platform for Motorola’s new Global Applications Management Platform (GAMA). The application creates what Motorola is terming a “virtual mall” for browsing and shopping for content on a mobile device. But Motorola is quick to point out the platform was more than just a portal interface. The platform integrates back to Motorola’s new GAMA back office and provisioning systems, allowing carriers and content providers to not only deploy new applications and content quickly but to customize on the fly ever detail of the service offering, from basic provisioning and billing to provisioning.

Motorola network services director Uma Murty gave an example of a game, which could be configured and promoted in multiple ways over the game’s lifetime on the deck. Instead of sticking a game in a content portal and letting it sit, a carrier could offer a game in multiple billing formats, from temporary rental to outright purchase, it could adjust pricing in real time as the popularity of the game waxes and wanes, it could set up controls to instantly distribute the game to several users for multiplayer games, and it could track the game throughout its lifecycle, determining the best moment to either scrap it from the deck or revive it with a new promotion, Murty said.

The announcement is the first in what is expected to be Motorola’s larger strategy for entering the content distribution space, a move that has been largely anticipated this year as competitors have become more aggressive in the content arena. Motorola’s strategy, however, is sharply different from the content platform strategies of Qualcomm and Nokia, both of which have launched top-to-bottom content distribution platforms that guide applications from development to the handset. Instead of providing applications themselves or the middleware over which to run the application, Motorola is providing a framework for those applications and software, Murty said.

“We think operators need an environment not an application,” Murty said. “These applications have a short shelf-life. We think we can do best at helping operators create a portfolio service instead of providing the content.”

Lucent, on the other hand, is providing the applications and content itself, but it’s doing it in a rather unique way. Instead of building a content delivery platform and building a content library, which it would then market and distribute to carriers, Lucent is designing a content ecosystem, which brings in the resources of its own applications group, third-party developers, technology currently under development in Bell Labs and the carriers itself. Lucent is creating a “paint-your-own-pot” clearing house for applications, allowing carriers to pick and choose different elements or whole applications and combine them to create their own unique content offerings, said Keith Chappell, managing vice president of Lucent’s global communications applications practice.

Chappell said Lucent is trying to turn the typical way of developing applications on its ear. Instead of building an application in-house, testing it, packaging it and then selling it to carriers, Lucent wants carriers to be included in the beginning of the process, allowing them to not only get the applications they want, but accelerate their time to launch. One of the biggest benefits of the program is that it brings Bell Labs vast resources into play, allowing carriers to utilize technology Lucent hasn’t yet made commercial, Chappell said.

Lucent would then host the applications for the carrier, and while the carrier would have exclusive rights to the individual apps it designed, the individual elements comprising the apps would be available to all of Lucent’s carrier customers, Chappell said.

Lucent also announced its first third-party partner for the program, called the Hosted Custom Applications Center. Pulse Entertainment is creating an element module for the program that animates static pictures--basically turning a digital photo of a person into a talking head. Using the modular approach of the Applications Center that technology can be used to create animated MMS messages, multimedia voicemail greetings and dozens of other targeted services, Chappell said.