One of the strongest underlining themes at Mobile World Congress this year is the impact of the economic crisis. Industry leaders, such as Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), have been vocal about how sales may be less than stellar this year based on struggling consumer confidence. But one thing that has seemed to have gone unaffected is the level of innovation and the number of announcements continuing to be made. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is pushing the envelope; carriers are adopting Google’s new operating system; Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is rolling out a new version of its operating system and is building new services, and Nokia is taking a huge risk by plunging into a new business. During this morning’s keynote MySpace’s CEO Chris DeWolfe and Olaf Swantee, Orange’s SVP of personal communications services, shared their confidence in the mobile entertainment industry.

Swantee: “I’m really excited about this whole thing, and when I listen to a lot of people here in Barcelona, a lot of people talk about the economic downturn and I think mobile and entertainment can be one of the strong levers of economic recovery. I wasn’t around in the 1930s, but one of the most important inventions came about then—the TV, and also the jet engine, and so I believe this economic situation is not a reason to sit idle and stop innovating in the areas that will get us out of the problem.”

DeWolfe: “We are very bullish on the mobile revenue model from the e-commerce perspective. We are partnering up with carriers and using our advertising expertise in a responsible way. We have massive amounts of data, and they have massive amounts of data and we can use GPS and the brands are going to be all over it. People will buy movie tickets, concert tickets and games, we couldn’t be more thrilled.”