MocoNews is reporting that Russie Beattie, a former Yahoo Mobile evangelist and the founder of Mowser, a mobile Web startup, is calling it quits after just one year with the new company. He explained that he hadn't been able to raise funding, and that growth on the site has been flat or falling for the past couple of months, "and 80 percent of it was for porn anyway." But he went further:

"Beyond the fact that I'm irretrievably in debt, the general answer is that I don't actually believe in the 'Mobile Web' anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I'm talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn't happened, and now I'm sure it isn't going to."

He goes on to list specific statistics about mobile Web use, which as MocoNews points out, actually seem to demonstrate that it's rising, not falling, saying that the iPhone in particular has contributed to this effect. Beattie sounds frustrated to us, but not particularly prescient. The Mobile Web has a lot of problems left to solve. But once you have the data plan on your phone (which consumers often sign up for for e-mail, unlimited texting, and so on), mobile Web use is free. So it's not like it's an additional $15 per month the way, say, mobile TV often is.