The 7th annual Mobile Games Forum was held in London on January 19th and 20th. Paul Flanagan, Executive in Residence, Ariadne Capital was invited to speak on a VC panel and relays his thoughts on the event.

The first thing that caught my attention is that our US cousins are more active on the mobile web than Europeans. How could this be - I thought we were light years ahead? Wrong. Alistair Hill, Lead Analyst of comScore Inc pointed out that the US carriers offer more unlimited data plans than European operators.

Mobile games are a big business, recently more dominated by big players such as EA Games and Gameloft than smaller studios or start-ups. For example, video game publisher Gameloft announced consolidated sales of €122m for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008. Years ago much of the coding and development moved offshore and UK game developers focused up-market on console titles.

 The noise of the internet is all around us and trying to decide what to focus on may be one of the reasons so many procrastinate rather than dive in. You need to know which communities serve which people, which tools are effective for business use and which social media and social networking sites to trust in terms of their ability to serve you into the future.

There have been thousands of casualties along the way, sites that have sprung up, made a lot of noise and then disappeared. Funding and running a site that serves millions of people around the world cannot be underestimated.

So you didn’t go to the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. Me neither. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. As Davos coverage spun through the media again this year, I wondered whether those 2,000 people who do go actually control the future of business.

Is it just my wishful thinking that power is more evenly distributed? Am I hostage to my myopic view from the world of the fast-growing start-up? Why am I so convinced that something profound is changing in terms of where the power lies?