Mobile Internet World - Day 2 - Morning

The morning presentations just concluded. We heard from three people:
Emily Green, the CEO of Yankee Group
Russ McGuire, Vice President of Strategy at Sprint
Anand Chandrasekher, Senior Vice President of the Ultra Mobility Group at Intel

Emily's presentation was interesting, themed around what the Yankee Group calls Unleashing the Anywhere Network. The Anywhere Network is really a concept defined as a common platform, bandwidth, intelligence, seemlessness, and ubiquity. There are a few issues with mobility today that are holding us back from realizing this innovation, including: network limitations, device limitations, pricing problems, spectrum, and mobile operators. Even with these issues preventing huge jumps in mobile innovation, flat rate data plans have unleashed huge appetites for more mobile services! In contrast, despite these large increases in mobile demand, mobile revenues are in long term decline. Weird. Continuing on a theme started yesterday, Emily says that the mobile browser is the field to nourish to easily address the fragmented market. Mobile popularity is having a huge impact on the enterprise. Workers want connectivity. In fact, workers say that their personal technology experience is better than what they have at work. Additionally, 20% of employees say they would be more productive at work if their technology experience matched that of which they have at home!

Next up, Russ McGuire, Vice President of Strategy at Sprint. His presentation was a lot of marketing of why Sprint is so great. I'm not sure they're as good as he presented, but they do have two great innovations: dominating the click to talk market, and also the first wide spread wimax solutions in Baltimore (and Boston soon to come). It's funny to hear execs from non AT&T operators talk about the iPhone. I definitely feel a sense of jealousy that they missed the boat. He briefly talked about how successful the iPhone has been, and then mention some aspects of how Sprint has innovated to excel their products beyond the iPhone. Russ did mention an interesting point about a customer fear. Customers have a concern around unintentionally subscribing to a pay service when using advanced funcitonality on their mobile device. They are worried that clicking a link will accidently subscribe them to a service for which they'll be committed to paying for something, even though they were just "trying something out." I find this definitely to be true, especially when I had my Verizon Wireless RAZR. Maybe part of this was the poor interface. It was not clear at all when I'd be charged for clicking a VCast link, or testing out a game.

Finally, Anand Chandrasekher, Senior Vice President of the Ultra Mobility Group at Intel made a presentation. He called 2008, the year of mobility. According to Forrester Research, 1 out of 2 mobile internet users prefer full internet pages on their mobile device, not a mobile version. Consumers are aware of the experience they can get on their computer, and aren't happy that their handheld doesn't provide that. Anand introduced Intel's Atom processor, released earlier this year. It will continue to allow for next generation mobile devices. Atom powered devices will have computing power comparable to laptops circa 2004. He had some devices on hand, they were somewhere between smartphones and laptops. I think he called them, mobile internet devices (which he later clarified, not expected to cannibalize laptops or smartphones). He showed two Intel vision videos which I embedded from YouTube in earlier posts. Closing his presentation, he brought up a picture of the Carpentier vs Dempsey boxing match in 1921. Anand posed the question to the audience, "Does anyone know why this event was revolutionary?" Answer: it was the first sporting event to be broadcasted over live radio. This was really when radio transitioned from a medium for news and information, to a medium for entertainment. The following year, sales of radios doubled, and the year following that, they doubled again. Anand compared this with what he expects will happen with mobile behavior and usage.