2 candidates for No. 1 mobile app

Have you tried to find anything on the mobile internet recently? Pretty tough going -trolling through lists of wap menus, going very deep to find dead-ends, non-active pages, and then some. Imagine driving to a potential destination without a map, without even knowing that the destination exists - that's the mobile internet experience today (at least from a non-Korean/Japanese perspective).

So candidate #1 for most useful mobile app? Mobile search. Search that cuts through all the intermediate links and gets us to the the final destination.

Want a Shakira ringtone? Type in Shakira and title of soundtrack, and get links to local ringtone suppliers (with local billing in place).
Want a find the nearest Starbucks so you can WiFi surf - enter Starbucks and your city location, and voila, locations of Starbucks outlets pop up.

Candidate #2 for most useful mobile app? It's the corollary of #1. There's already vast amount of information resources on the web - but most are not yet mobile enabled (e.g. chtml-ed, xhtml-ed). So rather than get 1 billion sites to rewrite their sites (easy though this may be individually, there's a whole lot of inertia), get one rocket scientist to design a mother of all transcoders, that can translate websites to be readable by mobile phones.

There are initiatives in both these areas (e.g. Opera for transcoding) but I just haven't seen a great one yet.

Money model (at least for the mobile search app) I think is even better than Google Adwords - get a fee for every click to call. How much would one pay for a sales prospect to call a customer centre - certainly much much more than a click to surf.