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April 03, 2007

CTIA 2007

Imagine a sultry nightclub filled with thousands of hip hop pimps with platinum grills wearing dark glasses, rappers iced to the teeth and bedecked in knockoff Burberry plaid suits and insanely hot women with navel piercings scantily clad in animal print miniskirts. Now picture them all standing around with glasses of Chardonnay in their hands respectfully and interestedly watching a guy up on stage dressed in a blue shirt and khakis talking about wireless technologies. “And this is the new FCU u501T3i,” he says with emphasis, the audience nodding, impressed. “What it adds over the FCU u501T3 is full switchable HSDPA/WiFi/WiMAX/Bluetooth/EVDO/VHF capability. That, plus the 10965k color TFT and 30 megapixel camera with 40x optical zoom – a first in the industry – makes this one slick device, if you'll pardon the colloquialism.” From the rapt crowd comes an enthusiastic but polite applause. One guy with a bandana wrapped around his head and a tattoo on his neck that says, “Playa” turns to one of his posse and says, “That is a very impressive handset. I believe consumers want that sort of spec. I believe it will drive data adoption.” His friend gives a measured nod, then responds, “I concur, but I think the iPhone, even though I haven't seen it, will be a category leader. Also, I must now utter some platitude about IMS.”

Impossible scenario? Maybe, but now juxtapose the audience and the guy on stage: It’s the same sultry nightclub, but it is filled with wireless geeks like me in blue shirts and khakis and the guy on stage is Grandmaster Flash. Says one blue shirt and khaki guy over the very loud music to his blue shirt and khaki’d co-worker “Yo, check homeboy doing his THANG on the 1’s and 2’s, yo!” “Word,” he replies, then, “You want another gin and juice?”

I actually heard this. (And I said yes.)

It was just this side of surreal. For a few hours I was transformed into the kind of person that drinks from little individual bottles of champagne, dances with (hired) insanely hot women and really enjoys rap and hip hop. The MTV/Motricity party at the Hard Rock was the best party I have been to in a long time. While not the "down wit o.p.p." type myself, I am definitely the “down wit o.p.m.” type, and I estimate that I personally consumed about $700 worth of entertainment that night, all for free, courtesy of two hosts who really know how to throw a party. Thank you Greg and thank you whoever works at Motricity who signed that check. Let’s have CTIA here again next year. And let’s have another party like that.

This post was going to be called “CTIA 2007 roundup” but while I was writing it, I got Chetan’s “CTIA 2007 roundup” and it was simply better than mine, so I wrote about my favorite party instead. Irrelevant, perhaps, but I think it is an indication that the mobile space is officially sexy. Go read Chetan’s very good synopsis here.

I think Fierce Wireless said it pretty well in their headline on the last day of CTIA: “Extra! Extra! No big news at CTIA.” Maybe it’s just a plateau. The big deal for the past few years has been the near-magical evolution of mobile data. And so here we are, at the state of the art, and there really isn’t much more that can be done. I mean, we’ve got broadcast TV, music, ringback, videotones, LBS, video, pictures, social networking, 3-D games, broadband and touchscreens. What could possibly be next? MobiSmell is not a technology I expect to see anytime soon.

So the industry has ramped technology, which is great. In a lot of ways, mobile consumers have more power in their hands than internet consumers. (Except there is no cut and paste for mobile consumers. Can you believe that shit? The simplest of viral enablers is still a mystery to our industry. Can it possibly be that difficult to allow users to cut, paste and send? If we could go back to Wordpefect 4.2-era circa 1986 technology and put it on a phone, that would be the next big thing.)

Anyway. Now all the pieces are in place, and I believe it is up to the ecosystem of innovators to use those pieces in new and interesting ways. I had breakfast with a smart VC friend of mine Thursday morning. He said that you don’t win because of your technology – you win because of your innovative business model. He’s right. There is nothing magical about, say, YouTube. Video, flash, HTML. There are no patents on their technology, but they used existing technologies to capture the imagination of consumers in a way that was really compelling. I think the same should be true in the mobile space. Trying to sell new technology to a carrier is a sure-fire way to get nowhere and burn a lot of cash. Rather, the mobile content industry should work within the four walls currently presented: SMS, PSMS, MMS, IM, WAP, J2ME, BREW, Flash and many others are all very powerful but underexploited technologies. For example, one of the things that smart VC and I discussed was this: Do you need to try to “do” SecondLife on the phone just like it is on the web? It is not currently possible or practical. More importantly, it may not even be required to make a bunch of money. What you can do is create a dashboard for the mobile phone that enables a certain amount of interactivity with that community that is useful to the mobile consumer in a mobile environment. It is perfectly reasonable that a user might want to interact in a non-avatar mode, but in an at-the-moment fashion on their mobile device.

I’ll just keep saying this: The mobile environment is not the web on a smaller screen. I really like the companies that are focusing on UI, content optimization and communication unification, as these are all about increasing mobile-relevance and usability.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at April 3, 2007 08:17 AM