Comments on: Final CTIA Post: Why Was It So Quiet?

By: Per-Fredrik Hagermark

Per-Fredrik Hagermark — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:35:55 +0000

I was there and could not agree more on the comments and reasons. Bar a few good meetings with very interesting people and existing clients, CTIA was completely irrelevant to me. (Well, the unplanned and great gig at The Joint with My Chemical Romance, Billy Talent and Dive By was a real bonus and highly relevant!)

As a company (www.acemob.com) in the mobile social networking space and woth a personal experience of 7 years in the mobile entertainment space, there were few new hot things to see. And again at an event where you to a large extent have MNO suppliers chasing the MNO budgets for infrastructure, billing systems etc. it is easy for me to feel the whole CTIA is irrelevant. Therefore I had set my focus on the Mobile Entertainment show the day before. But I must say, bar Andy Nulman’s slot named “Why mobile content suck”, there was nothing there either. So it all boiled down to a somewhat convenient way to meet a lot of people. However the quality of these conference meetings is always pretty bad. Delays, noisy environment, very short meetings etc. So I wonder if it would not even have been better to spend some more money and time and travel around to make the same meetings at the various companies offices instead.

I think smaller/niched events at lower cost is the way forward if any at all. I am a bit of a conference sceptic I must say. IIR, Marcus Evans and the others are the ones that really make money on us. Shouldn’t we make money among ourselves instead?

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:23:09 +0000

Interesting. What was the word on WiMax vs. LTE. One or the other? Or any talk of co-existence? Has to be some controversial information coming out of here!

By: Carlo Longino

Carlo Longino — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:59:54 +0000

Jason, nobody mentioned it. It wasn’t taboo, I just don’t think anybody put much credence into Buzz’s report (assuming they’d heard about it).

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:53:36 +0000

Carlo, saw your CTIA roundup on hyperconnectivity.com. And it did appear rather light and somewhat uninteresting. Was there any talk about the Airspan/Buzz Broadband implosion down under? Or was the subject taboo?

By: jamie Wells

jamie Wells — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:31:58 +0000

Carlo,

Couldn’t agree more about the “not too much of interest” vibe both this year as well as in year’s past. When pressed to blog about this year’s show I sort of punted and did a silly post detailing the giveaways on the show floor – http://mobilestance.com/2008/04/04/presenting-the-1st-annual-ctia-wireless-swaggie-awards/

I think part of the reason that no one is overly impressed is that the hype has been dialed up so far and for so long by the finance community (and their minions the research firms) that our expectations are ridiculously skewed. That, and the massive partying.. I mean, “networking” that goes on leaves most in a poor state of mind to evaluate the potential of developments in the industry.

things are happening… more convergence between data and voice apps seem pretty interesting – if only the apps start working

By: Candace

Candace — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:54:03 +0000

Hiya-
I have been to a bajillion of CTIA’s (oh, for the days in Nawlins!) and agree with you Carlo. As the world flattens and more companies think globally, the place to place bets is MWC. I think CTIA the org should drop the spring show and make the fall event the biggie. This would make it more of a showcase for holiday handsets, too.

By: Carlo Longino

Carlo Longino — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:23:51 +0000

Hi Scott, I think the European market is certainly more open and advanced than the US one when it comes to mobile content and services (that’s not a revelation or anything). So it’s likely a combination of that factor/there’s not a lot of money being made alongside the proximity of MWC. I’d imagine that if lots of money was being made from mobile services in the US, content companies would be out in much more force at CTIA, regardless how close it falls to MWC.

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:50:15 +0000

Hi Carlo, this comment “CTIA is an operators’ trade group, and this is their show. And those operators are the ones currently making money in the US mobile market. So CTIA gets dominated by people clamoring for operators’ spending: network gear vendors, distributors and retailers and so on” is also true for MWC isn’t it?
And if so, doesn’t that simply mean that if third party content services are more prevalent at MWC than CTIA that there is more of an open market for these services in Europe than the US at the moment? Even then, I am not sure that this is a particularly strong argument.

Perhaps we are simply seeing that MWC and CTIA are too close together now and need to be spaced more evenly in the year. Even for a big company the effort of getting ready for MWC is exhausting. If you can re-use that material twice then I entirely understand why people would.

By: Vince

Vince — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:47:02 +0000

i’ve attended CTIA numerous times before and decided to skip this one– as i know it will be dominated by the operators and their issues.

I hope the future shows be more affordable to smaller firms with innovative services– and usually this companies are the one with the wow factor products. Be it in mobile entertainment or mobile marketing..

mobile entertainment and marketing i think will be one of the revenue drivers of the operators and i feel that they should consider supporting the VAS providers.