Julie Meyer: My Business Week

It's the middle of the summer, and you wouldn't know. Companies are getting funded, rolling out products, taking markets by storm, and no one I know is worried about their summer holiday.

I noticed that Laurence Alexander, the man widely credited with bringing the BlackBerry into the UK, is at the helm of ROK, a mobile media group, and losing no time in setting the tone and the model for other cool services.

He is the "rest of world's" answer to Apple – one of the few people in the industry who consistently puts the consumer at the heart of everything he does. His ROK Entertainment Group, a UK-based mobile TV outfit, has completed the world's first music concert to be streamed live over mass-market, slower mobile phones (live events have only ever been streamed over 3G).

The "Be My Guest concert" was staged in July in Banglok and was streamed across a four-hour period, live and exclusive, to 80,000 subscribers.

I started the week catching up with my friend Rod Hall, the communications technology analyst at JP Morgan, talking about what we think is going to unblock this wall of venture capital-backed mobile content and services start-ups which are failing to get any significant traction in the market. Apple's iPhone and its high-street presence, now the third-largest retailer in the US, is changing the mobile industry significantly by going direct to consumers and bypassing mobile operators. Also, Google has announced plans to offer a search service for mobile content.

It's always about the consumer. They want simple applications which make their life fun, easy or connected.

Companies which manage to remember that will be the winners.