March 24, 2004

Add on top of that, the fact that you only have three days to see the multitude of companies' wares and attend the various educational classes that were available. I am telling you this just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the event, I was certainly impressed. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first day of the three-day event. Now let me tell you the substance of my experience at this congregation of industry luminaries, executives, and developers.

Keynote Speeches

The morning started off with Keynote speeches by four very prominent and influential people in the industry. First, Steve Largent, former Wide Receiver for the Seattle Seahawks, and a former Oklahoma Senator, and current President & CEO of the CTIA opened the ceremonies. Next, Michael Powell, the current Chairman of the FCC, presented his view of where the industry is headed and the US government's view of its direction. He was followed by Scott McNealy, Chairman & CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc, and John T. Chambers, President & CEO of Cisco Systems, both of whom spoke of how their companies are participating in the creation of the wireless world.

Steve Largent described his view of the industry’s potential, and introduced each of the remaining Keynote speakers during the presentation. Steve quoted some very interesting statistics, noting that in 1993 there were only 16 million "wireless" users in the US. However at the end of 2003, this number had grown to 160 million, a 10-fold increase. He went on to say that by the end of this year, the total number of camera phones sold is expected to eclipse the total number of DVD players sold in all the years that they have existed! He concluded with the fact that over $3.5 Billion worth of Ringtones had been sold world wide last year. Clearly, there is a market out there.

After his introductory speech, Steve hosted a question and answer session with Michael Powell. Below are some of the paraphrased questions and answers as best as I was able to write them down.

• Q. Is regulation of the wireless industry essential in the US?
• A. No, not at this point in time, but as any industry matures, it draws more consumer attention, and likewise government attention. As long as competition is flourishing, then regulation is not necessary.

• Q. Is there a place for wireless technology to contribute to community services?
• A. With approximately 160 million subscribers, there is a tremendous potential for individuals to contribute to things like assisting with law enforcement when a crime is being witnessed.

• Q. Will there be regulation on VoIP?
• A. Yes, as services move to software, like 911 services, it will be regulated, but, not in a "classic economic way".

Michael Powell then went on to say that there were 3 key areas to address in order to expand wireless technology in the US.

1. Increase the available spectrum
2. Allow the flexibility for developers to create innovative applications.
3. Create secondary markets, something he referred to as "market liquidity".

Finally, he noted that wireless applications needed to be highly interactive and allow for maximum mobility. "Remember" he said, "Today’s 15 year olds will be the paying customers in 3-4 years. They are used to highly interactive video games."

I'm not sure what I expected from Scott McNealy before he came on stage, but, he turned out to be a real hoot once he got in the spotlight! Of course, he spent most for his 40 minute presentation expounding on the vision that Sun Microsystems has for the future of computing, but what was just as entertain was his panache for spewing Microsoft slights! Referring to PCs as "Wintel Space Heaters", the desktop Start Button as the "Restart Button", and Outlook as "Microsoft Look-out". I assume that Bill Gates is just as amusing with his quips about Sun. Or maybe he just thinks that Sun is irrelevant, I don’t know.

Some of the stats that Scott presented were:

• that over 500 million Java Smartcards have been shipped and are used for user identification
• 1.5 billion devices have been shipped using Java technology
• there are more than 300 different makes & models of some kind of Java phone

One of the really neat things that he demonstrated was the idea of a mobile desktop. Basically, all your data and desktop profiles are stored on a server "somewhere", and you can access your desktop via a Java Smartcard on any "Sun Ray" appliance. You can read more detailed information about it at http://wwws.sun.com/sunray/. The idea is that only a keyboard, display and a card reader are required, minimizing hardware cost and increasing battery life since there is less hardware to power. The Sun campus has been using these systems for a few years, and AT&T is getting ready to pilot it at some of their facilities.

He also showed the latest version Star Office, but the item that really got my attention was a 3D desktop called "Project Looking Glass", touted as "an intuitive, 3-D way to interact with desktop applications". It was really slick to watch him navigate his way around the desktop moving and rotating individual window panes 360 degrees in the Z plane! It was pretty wiz-bang!

The last speaker was John T. Chambers. Unfortunately, I was not able to catch all of his presentation, but his perspective was from the network infrastructure point of view. His challenge to the audience was: "How do we build a network today, to meet the needs of the future?" In his view, it will need to marry the wired net with a variety of wireless environments. He sees Cisco Systems as creating a network that can provide "any service via any device over any connection type". This will require the network to have enough intelligence to determine the device type, the requested service, and provide for the "right" connection to that service. Implicitly it will also have to provide security and user authentication. This will require many of today’s vendors to form partnerships, because no one company has all the resources required to make this kind network a reality.

Events/Exhibits

After the keynote speeches it was time to mill around the exhibit halls; all 5 of them. I only had enough time to get about a quarter of the way through one of them.

The first event I attended was the Fashion in Motion: Wireless Fashion Show. This was a half hour show of very pretty 20 somethings modeling the latest wireless ware from a myriad of manufactures. Items ranging from sensible looking Sunglasses with heads up displays to some kind of bizarre Fiber Optic "Light" dress were paraded around the run way. Some of the things like the Pink Ladies Compact cell phone looked like they might actually be appealing to the right market segment. Other things like the "Light" dress were just a little too "out there" for me to take seriously. Still it was very entertaining and got you thinking about the possibilities.

Next up was the Worlds Smallest Film Festival. The idea was to showcase "mobile film, animation, TV, and music videos". It was sponsored by a company called bigDIGIT, a content distributor. However it turned out to be pretty much of a bust, because after about 30 seconds in to the first clip they started experiencing "technical difficulties". I’m sure this was a very embarrassing event for them, but, after about 5 minutes of trying to fix the problem many other people and I got disenchanted and went off to see some of the vendor exhibits.

As I said earlier, I was only able to get through about one quarter of the first exhibit hall, bear in mind that there was so much more to see, so here is a synopsis of some of the more interesting things I saw.

Hardware Vendors: LG (they were giving cellphones away once every hour), Microsoft had a display of their Media Center, Sierra Wireless was showing off their Voq Phone, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Samsung and Siemens all had giant pavilions loaded with their handsets.

Publishers: "Wireless Week" and "mobilepc" both had booths where they were passing out free magazines.

Software/Content Providers: Blue Lava Wireless – developer mobile content, their big product is Tetris for Java phones. QSoundLabs – producers of a portable digital audio engine called microQ. This engine uses the Windows API to produce its audio system. Taito Corp. – producer of various Qualcomm Brew games. Mobile Operandi – a cross between a content provider and website hosting company.

Education

The primary reason for my attendance to CTIA was for the educational opportunity. In the two panel discussions I attended, I was able to learn quite a bit about the current state of wireless affairs. The educational sessions were broken into three Tracks.

Track 1: Technology Road Map

Track 2: Business Ecosystem

Track 3: Marketing Opportunities.

The two panel discussions I attended were: Track 1 - Developer Roundtable, and Track 3 - Entertainment: The Springboard to Mobile Data Adoption. Following are the highlights that I gleaned from these discussions.

Developer Roundtable:

The purpose of this panel was to discuss the challenges that consumers and developers face ranging from operator participation, device formats, data types, testing and certification. The moderator was Konny Zsigo, President, "Wireless Developer". He opened the discussion by stating that publishers, and handset manufacturers, have quadrupled their investment in quality hardware/software components (things like video and audio output) over the last nine months, and it is expected that the investment will quadruple again over the next year. The reason for this is because consumers are demanding "high quality" video/entertainment on their portable devices. It’s not enough just to be able to run video or play music, it’s got to be something that the user perceives as "excellent". This is something that Scott McNealy had also emphasized.

Konny also, talked about the failure of the "write once, run anywhere" Holy Grail to actually materialize. The reason is that Handset manufactures and carriers are constantly diverging from the types of platforms that they will support, and of course, they want content immediately for the new platform dejour. [It sound to me like this is a golden opportunity for the AACE to shine, if we can get engines built and distributed to the OEMs in a timely fashion].

One of the panelists, Scott Newman, CEO, GoldPocket Interactive, stated that he felt a good potential market to focus on would be SMS applications used in cooperation with local radio stations. That got me to thinking about the situation. I can see how a local station could use this to differentiate it self from the competition. They could sponsor voting polls on the favorite local lunch time restaurant, or collect stats on what favorite artist the public would like to see brought into town. This goes back to Michael Powell’s (FCC Chairman) comment about designing apps for the teenage and 20 year olds markets, since they are the ones growing up in this SMS age.

Steve Spencer, EVP of Wireless Solutions Pinnacor, raised a very interesting point when he said that he expects "real standards" to become established over the next few years as a natural selection process begins to occur. For instance, in the US there are about 6 carriers at the moment, but he expects that will be whittled down to abut 3 or 4 in the future simply by the forces of free competition. The result will be a reduction in the number of proprietary IP schemes in use, thus causing a defacto standard to emerge. I don’t think he is too far off base with that reasoning.

Concluding the session, Konny tied into the standards argument , by stating that he expects "content will be packaged much like cable channels are today, but, only after the industry has settled on the ‘standards’ that everyone must adhere to". He believes that the user would subscribe to a basic package of wireless services, and for an additional fee could increase the number of bells and whistles included in it.

Entertainment: The Springboard to Mobile Data Adoption

This plenary was comprised of leaders in the music, gaming, television and movie industries. It was moderated by Ralph Simon, Chairman , Mobile Entertainment Forum. On the panel were Brian Biniak President, American Greetings Mobile, Ted Cohen SVP, D3 - Digital Development & Distribution, EMI Music, Kenji Hisatsune EVP & COO, Namco America Inc (producers of PACMAN)., Keith Hindle VP, Fermantle Media, Nick Lehman VP, Interactive Business Development MTV, and Steve Wadsworth President Walt Disney Internet Group.

How many of you remember Amiga’s mantra a year or two ago … "Content is King" …? Guess what I heard at this forum, in so many words? Kenji Hisatsune stated that what the industry needs is "quality content and lots of it’. He went on to say that there are no second chances to impress the buying public in this business, that sentiment that was agreed upon by the entire panel.

Steve Wadsworth noted that content downloading and subscriptions at Disney were increasing at an accelerated rate over the past year, and he expected that trend to continue. He went on to say that one of the industries biggest challenges at the moment is in educating the public about what content is available for which handsets. In my mind this loosely relates to the need for some amount of standardization. For the average consumer the amount of confusion that is created by this diversity of content and platforms is beginning to outweigh the advantage of having a choice of devices and applications to run on them. As in so many things in life, there has to be a balance somewhere. Another point that Steve made was that Disney is working hard on a strategy to establish relationships with handset manufactures to provide content preloaded on their devices at launch time.

In general, everyone seemed to agree that the key to "mobile wireless" is to find the right content, to run on the right handset, over the right network, targeted at the right audience. Not exactly rocket science, but, to date no one seems to have found the winning combination yet.

Wrap-up

I found the whole conference to be very exciting, and I am looking forward to attending next year's event in New Orleans Louisiana, March 14 -16, 2005. I also plan to make every effort to spend all three days next time. There is just way too much to see, learn and absorb if you try to cram it into any less amount of time.

I guess the overall impression that I left with was as follows. You can liken the nascent stage of the wireless industry to a horse race. Imagine all the riders are mounted on there great and mighty steeds and the horses are in the gate. Everyone can see the finish line a mile away down the track, and we're all waiting for the starting bell to ring. But wait! Where's the track! Nobody has cleared the track yet! It's nothing but a maze of rocks, shrubs and hazards! We can't have a horse race until after the track is cleared.

The wireless industry is in much the same predicament. There are great technologies like the AmigaDE, Tao's intent, Java, Brew, etc. Each one has the potential to be a real contender. Likewise, many of the markets have been identified and they have the cash in hand to spend. The only problem is that there are too many self proclaimed "standards" (i.e. no clean and clear track to run on), too many companies wanting the "Big" slice of the pie. And oh! By the way, nobody has figured out the biggest question of all … Exactly what is it the consumer wants, and how can we get them to pay for it? When all these issues have been adequately addressed, the market will be ready for the contest to begin. My gut feeling is that we probably still have 2-3 years until Race Day.

About Omniscience:

Omniscience is a software company specializing in programming for Amiga Digital Environment (AmigaDE) compatible devices. Our company creates utility software for developing AmigaDE applications, as well as, programming to run on these devices. We strive to produce constructive, entertaining and educationally stimulating software that is appropriate for a broad spectrum of interests.