The speed of app innovations, especially mobile apps, is unbelievable and at the same time challenging for all players in the market. In the US the app hype started with social apps. In Europe we needed more time to understand the value of apps in general. 
More than two years after social app stores rocked in myspace and facebook in the US, apps finally came over to EU over the iPhone and the Apple app store in 2008.
Mobile social aggregators were one of the market openers for that trend. In my view they brought, besides game apps, the break-through for apps in Europe.
One of our portfolio companies, widgetlabs, the first European app agency, developed a social aggregator for Vodafone Germany (Vodafone Update). The model was an early ‘mobile first’ case around the world. Today we all know, based on Fred Wilson’s famous advice, that in the future mobile gonna be first in most cases.
This market is now moving towards consolidation. It looks like UeberMedia is one of the players which is driving this market to new dimensions. They own UeberTwitter a famous Blackberry aggregator, they recently bought EchoFon, one of the early players on iPhone and today they announced the acquisition of TweetDeck for close to $30mil. TweetDeck is a major desktop aggregator which successfully managed to catch the mobile side of the party as well. 
The hard conclusion is that the time between starting an app venture till consolidation seems to be about two to three years within the mobile app space! For corporates this pace will be their worst nightmare, as we can see in the Nokia case!
TweetDeck Announcement: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/ubermedia-tweetdeck/