Mobile has shown the need for new systems of dealing with identity, application management and sync. Essentially, you need 'cloud services' to get the most out of mobile but anything you buy into is typically hampered in some way (iCloud, Google etc). What would be great is if everyone had their own place in the cloud which could run basic infrastructure (e.g mail, contacts, calendar) and then new applications could be installed there to provide additional services (an analogy might be that you MITM yourself). To do this well involves reassessing how we build software for distributed systems. I'm working on the underlying tools to make this possible - http://nymote.org

its interesting to look at keystone components in mobile. AFAIK it looks as though identity is the predominant keystone API . if you own identity then you are leveraged across both mobile apps and web.