It’s been a busy week. I had intended to post every day, but the level of activity was overwhelming, and minimum sleep flying to Europe followed by five hours of sleep per night while there just got to me.
In a business sense, this was a very good show, for NMS and seemingly for many others. There’s tons of opportunity at many levels.
Taking the longer view, I worry. Tim Berners-Lee, in his keynote address, beseeched the industry to “be a foundation, not a ceiling.” He talked of the enormous opportunities that the open Internet has generating. The walled gardens of the mobile industry are stifling this potential.
Of course they’re going to collapse. Countries with mobile oligopolies may preserve their walled garden for years but, as serious 3G bandwidth and other sources of connectivity (WiMAX, WiFi) roll out in developed countries with real competition (3+ competitors making significant investments), the walls will collapse. I’m talking 2–5 years. Based just on anecdotal conversations, I think many of the operators realize this, but their whole structure and organization is such that all they can do is milk the current situation, leaving their future to be dealt with in the future.
Highlights: Mobile communities, Mobile TV (& here), talk about mobile advertising (most of which I missed), Femtocells (also here), and WiMAX (which grates on 3GSM types), but not much progress on GSMA instant messaging (last year’s buzz). Also, last year’s radio hype was HSDPA, so I expected hype for HSUPA this year, but evidently it’s not quite ready (or it’s too little and will be too late to counter WiMAX?).
In any event the radio technology hype was diffuse, but included multiple announcements about 3GSM’s Long Term Evolution (LTE) from DoCoMo, Ericsson (and others I missed). This is an obvious counter to the WiMAX crowd, but it’s a lame response, as LTE demos are a few years off with deployment still further.
Finally, the show was even bigger than last year — claims are between 57K & 60K people attended.
Here’s the NMS booth on opening day.
What was in it? MyCaller ringback tones, of course. We now have 27 operators who’ve deploy our system. But we showed several new applications for the first time — Interactive 3G Mobile TV and Mobile Publishing, both based on 3G video calling technology. And on the developer front we showed the first AdvancedTCA media blade, our MG 7000A and the latest release of our Vision VXML Server targeted at IVVR (interactive voice and video response).
Our strategy is to foster a rich developer community and then partner with developers in that community to bring new applications to our operator footprint. Thus the Vision VXML Server is the core of various IVVR (interactive voice and video response) platforms, including those that run Interactive 3G Mobile TV and Mobile Publishing.
I’m writing this on the plane (using BlogJet software) but I’m fading, so good night for now.
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