Last week, I wrote about the carriers being ripe for resale. Today, I want to point out that they are willing to go long on concepts.

As our pal Napoleon Hill would say "Anything the Mind can Concieve, it can Achieve."  When it comes to M2M venture capital is available.

Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless at the Innovation Center Is looking for submissions. The Venture Fund is a mix of VC and VZW and their vendor partners.  The center is a bit of a cross between VCs and Carrier Testing.  The good news is that its aimed at making it more VC like and less Carrier Testing. The bad news is VCs are hard enough to get through. ;<) 

It's unclear at this time, what role the carrier will play in the app world.  At Startup2010 run by Silicon Inside, I heard many companies looking to claim mobility as their secret sauce to success.  The winner was Redbeacon, which is probably going to force a change at Angie's list and Craigslist.

The problem of matching services with customers with just a phone number these days is hard to do. Redbeacon was designed to get the feedback system right. 

The web is the right place to put your strategy according to many of the Startup2019 speakers,  The app interface Is a method of distribution and not an end itself.

Many of the startups were pointing to Facebook (News - Alert) as their venue of choice for finding customers  I am not sure, when crowd sourcing can be guaranteed to be valuable.

My pals at Iotum, were one of the first Facebook apps with Calliflower and they did a beautiful job of integrating.  Jeff Pulver (News - Alert) had a FWD voice mail app that was brilliant and I did not see that take off.  Personally I would have much preferred these apps to be part of the invites instead of Farmville and MafiaWars. 

When it comes to M2M the best part of social networking would be for the showcasing of solutions. This is what I am intending to do with a series of audiocasts available to our newsletter subscribers.

My VC friends tell me they see roll up opportunities in M2M,   Before last year, the M2M space was siloed in specific corporate networks.  Today, wireless data services are plentiful and groups like the CDMA Development Group are looking to highlight some of the implementations.

You are going to hear some great people talking about opportunities and solutions.  Who knows, they may inspire you to submit your own ideas.