spent 3 days at CTIA last week, attending some talks and panels, and also roaming the show floor and also taking in the Wireless Home.
The show was very large, they say 4 city blocks worth of exhibits - I walked so much think I lost weight in New Orleans, land of the BBQ, bignets, andPo’boy sandwiches. It (the show) was very glizty, with booth displays rivaled only by those I’ve seen at the Consumer Electronics Show.
There were many panels, on everything from mobile entertainment to tower placement strategies. I skipped the tower placement stuff :-). At the bottom of this post, I’ll list and link to some interesting things, but first, my overall summary.
It’s another year of more of the same. More hype. Some small progress on things like Premium Rate SMS, SMS use, and some WAP technologies. Sure, the handsets can now play polyphonic ring tones. Gee wow(!). And the color displays are better. But still, the industry is to my mind fundamentally broken.
It is broken in that it is stratified, closed, and fragmented at each stratification. At the bottom layer you have the handsets, that don’t use similar technologies, screen resolutions, keyboards, or input mechanisms (Nokia vs. Kyocera vs. Mot vs. LG vs. ..). Then here in our backwards land of America we have the disparate access technologies CDMA / TDMA / GSM, and the data equivalents of 1x, EVDO, Edge, GPRS, …. Then the carriers themselves build walled gardens to try to keep their customers in. Then, the aggregators, each of whom has a different business model of up-front vs. recurring fees. And finally, the edge programming technology, or delivery mechanisms, which vary by carrier, technology, and handset.
This fragmentation of closed systems, combined with the carriers’ attempts to control and monetize the content that reaches their users, results in a world where business success is determined not by the usability or value of the application, but rather on the interpersonal relationships, networking and positioning skills of content and application developers. Many quality applications developers can’t play this game, and hence either don’t enter or fail. Many crappy app developers can play this game, and hence get prominent placement for bogus little games, or bad pixel-based drawings of Hollywood starlets. (It’s unbelievable really, the some of the junk that passes for salable content.)
The overall whole combines to place almost insurmountable obstacles in the path of someone trying to build an application of value for the mobile user. It’s dysfunctional, and I don’t see it fixing itself. I’m of a mind to write a piece contrasting the closed and hence broken nature of mobile wireless, vs. the open and hence catalyzing nature of IP communications. I think a good contrast could be made, and that the openness of the internet is why various domains like social networking, blogs, podcasting, and sites like 43 things, flickr, del.icio.us, and for that matter the wikipedia etc. are growing. The wireless carriers’ need to monetize all content and transactions is stifling the domain of mobile computing. Mesh can’t come soon enough for me …
Don’t take my word for it. Bob Frankston writes about mobile carriers wanting to charge .25 to send a picture to another carrier
If you look at the Open Mobile Alliance specifications you’ll find yourself in a warped (wapped?) version of the Internet protocols with references to the RFCs and then their own special versions. The argument for a parallel universe is that the wireless bits are very scarce and expensive. While today’s cellular networks do have significantly less capacity than the rest of the Internet, it is not so extreme as to justify WDML in place of HTML. The real problem is that the architecture of the cell phone doesn’t make it easy or safe to write independent software applications. The browsers need to be frozen into silicon and can’t be fixed short of replacing the phone. In general you cannot simply connect to a phone — you must connect to a gateway in order to send a message. This gateway translates the message and typically creates another billable event.
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Ok, enough of my rant. Here’s some observations about the show.
1. Picture phones are really becoming prevalent, and resolutions and storage capabilities are increasing. (Somewhere there’s a idea to develop about the worldwide distributed sensor network that is being created … ).
2. The SMS and PRSMS aggregators are maturing and only a few will be left standing, my money is on mBlox and M-Qube.
3. The industry is being showered with money. Many dubious propositions are awash in 5 - 10 million dollar B rounds and some are into their Cs and Ds. To me, this is an indication of the ultimate promise of mobile computing with broadband speed data access. For why I think much of this is a bad investment, see the points I make above. I do think there are some good investments in the space, but it’s not in yet another ring tone company (yartc).
4. The Wireless Home was a pretty cool showcase. I will write about it separately.
5. There were at least a few providers, including Wherify, that have cell phones for kids. These devices include allowing outbound calls to a very small set of numbers, allowing inbound calls only from a very small set of numbers. And, chillingly to my mind, the ability to GPS-track your kid’s location on a GIS display. (If you can do this, who else can hack in and do it?) However in today’s society of overbearing and litigious parents, I suspect they have a hit on their hands …
6. Along this line, geolocation is just beginning, with no real apps yet. But, it is coming, I expect next year we will see significant progress made.