"We have no choice but to innovate," says Olaf Swantee, head of mobile operations at Orange, a big European operator.
Co-founders Nash Islam was previously head of mobile operations at Google, together with Oxford graduate Robin Doble, formerly a trader at Barclays and founder of app-based car-washing service GoWashMyCar.
The lack of 4G speed also has not slowed growth in mobile advertising, said Jon Mew, the director of mobile and operations at the Internet Advertising Bureau U.K. in London, a group representing the country's biggest online advertisers.
Cresswell, who was a client of Arqiva during his time at ITV, said that he would need to "get up to speed" with the company's mobile operations.
The Indian mobile phone company Idea Cellular agreed to acquire the mobile operations of Escotel Mobile Communications for 12.5 billion rupees ($276 million).
AT&T and Verizon, which have profitable and fast-growing mobile operations, would love to kill what has long been known as "plain old telephone service", or POTS, over the next few years.
"We're looking at the jigsaw puzzle now on a broader basis," Mr. Stanton, who would head Deutsche Telekom's mobile operations in the United States, said in a telephone interview.
Zillow plans to help its new acquisition expand its mobile operations, including by introducing apps.
Speaking at Nokia World in Stuttgart on Thursday, Henri Moissinac, head of Facebook's mobile operations, presented a new program called "Facebook Connect For Mobile Web"four lines of code that add a Facebook Connect button onto any app on any mobile platform, as long as the handset has a Web browser.
The Eurasia segment comprises mobile operations in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Moldova and Nepal.
As Jon Mew, director of Mobile and Operations at the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), said, millions of BBC viewers now own smartphones and are "dual screening" by watching television at the same time.
