Vodafone’s tie-up with Yahoo for graphic ads and 3’s orchestration of a new order mobile ecosystem do more than (hopefully) drive data services; they lay the groundwork for new mobile business models.

This article in BusinessWeek recaps recent developments and surveys some of the industry’s leading thinkers to get their take. For John Delaney of Ovum, the signs all point to a “fundamental shift” in the way mobile operators do business. “We’re now seeing operators starting to move toward the Internet model: not charging users—or not charging them so much—for the Internet and to try and interest advertisers to use the mobile phone as a site for advertising.” The key is finding a way to unlock advertising that potential without alienating the user. “If it can be done, the potential is just phenomenal. It would dwarf TV and the Internet as a medium for advertising.”

Dean Bubley at Disruptive Analysis argued operators should focus on enabling connectivity, access and advertising. But there’s no fact or easy money. “I don’t see mobile advertising in the short run making a huge contribution—it won’t grow as fast as, say, Google has in terms of the PC-based Web simply because Google took a relatively understood format and just tweaked it. Here, it may be back to square one.”

Finally, John Strand of Strand Consult predicted leaner times ahead for mobile operators and a shift to a “supermarket approach.” As he put it: “The winning business model in the future is not the one that Vodafone is using. It’s not the one that 3 is using. If you look across Europe, the most successful operators are the ones focused on driving down fixed costs, ensuring customers are paying as much as possible flat rate and then having some product on top of that they can add some extra revenue on. And those services, they will not buy them in the future; they will get them from the service providers on a pure revenue-sharing model.”