A new partnership is in effect between Neomobile and Mobango, who are collaborating with wireless carriers to market a new mobile applications store in Italy.

The store will be powered by Mobango, with technology under the VIP Mobile brand. The VIP Power Application Store is intended to be a mobile service that lets consumers download applications and utilities, which are published by Mobango's community of developers, to their mobile devices.

"Mobile applications is a new segment that puts together content and services from the traditional mobile entertainment market, such as games and personalization, but adds a whole new line of products, which opens an entire new market space," said Gianluca D'Agostino, CEO of Neomobile, Rome, Italy.

"Apple, by launching its App Store, entered a blue ocean and now many different players want to enter the application store business," he said.

Neomobile is an Italian mobile entertainment company that designs, develops, markets and distributes digital content and interactive services in association with wireless carriers worldwide.

Mobango is a user-generated mobile application community site set to provide mobile consumers with a platform to create, store, share, download and play any type of mobile content while allowing brands, publishers and developers to generate massive distribution of their mobile applications.

The company believes that its partnership with Neomobile presents the opportunity to deliver a one-stop-shop for consumers and a platform for both companies to pursue technological research together.

Consumers can text in to the short code 48278 for a link, where they can download applications such as communication platforms, antivirus software, media viewers, themes and games.

These applications are available for smartphones and other mobile phones based on operating systems such as Nokia's Symbian, Java, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Google's Android, RIM's BlackBerry and Palm.

"To be honest, the challenge we will continue to face for the immediate future is still cross-device compatibility," Mr. D'Agostino said. "Mobile technology is still very fragmented and the cost and effort of optimizing applications for the thousands of different devices currently in the market is still an issue.

"However, Mobango's growing developer community and the Neomobile platform's device recognition capabilities are the key solution to compatibility issues," he said.

The store is set to catalogue more than 10,000 applications with service based on a weekly subscription.

The "all-you-can-eat" formula includes no more than 10 application downloads a week per user and comes with a newsletter to notify users about new applications.

Access to the VIP Power Application Store can be achieved directly through the mobile site.

Both companies plan to promote heavily through a variety of media channels such as TV, print, the Web, WAP and SMS.

"There is a tendency in our industry to overhype one specific business model such as ad-funded, mobile Internet, device walled gardens and see it develop to the extreme and prevail on all the others," Mr. D'Agostino said.

"We instead believe all the newest trends from vendor app stores to mobile 2.0 will lead to a plethora of offerings and sustainable business models, even with players very different from each other competing at the highest levels of the mobile entertainment market," she said.