I first heard VisionMobile research director Andreas Constantinou speak at M-Days in Frankfurt last year, and I was massively impressed. Never before had I seen someone dissect an entire industry and distil it down into half a dozen key takeaways the way he did. Like the one about RIM and Apple. At the time, he explained, the two companies had a combined share of around 6-7 per cent of the handset market. But because of their smartphone focus, they accounted for 55 per cent of the industry’s profits.An amazing stat.

So when VisionMobile puts out a report, it’s worth taking notice, and the firm has released one today, entitled: HTML5 And What  It Means For The Mobile Industry.

The report notes that while HTML5 has been much-hyped, and is being championed by mobile web enthusiasts for its many capabilities, including off-line storage, 2D graphics, video/audio streaming, geo-location, and access to the phone’s camera and sensors, HTML5 implementation on mobile devices is, as yet, both fragmented and incomplete, with the leading smartphone platforms showing inadequate HTML5 support.

The report concludes that while HTML5 introduces several technology innovations, it remains a technology change that is not designed to solve discovery, distribution or monetisation problems – in other words it is not designed to change the business model of the web.

What will change the business model of the web, according to VisionMobile are the innovations introduced in the apps economy – where content is created with semantic tagging (description, category, user ratings, etc), discovered via web stores (much like app stores), distributed within walled gardens (much like Facebook), and monetised through micro-payments (much like apps). The analyst calls this web 3.0.

You can read Constantinou’s blog post on the report here. And you can access the full report here.