preparing to ship out its first cellphones built on
Android platform later this year, wireless carriers are expecting an avalanche
of innovation from users - and radical changes to what customers expect and
demand.
But some disagree on where start-ups should focus their efforts if they aim to
make money in this fast-changing landscape.
At the Wireless Innovations 2008 conference in Redwood City, Calif., sponsored
by Dow Jones & Co.,
broadband and new business division, said he had already seen prototypes of the
company's Android-based phone, which are scheduled to ship in this year's final
quarter.
(This story also appeared in Venture Wire, a newsletter published by Dow Jones
& Co. that covers the venture-capital industry.)
"I'm impressed," he said. "We will have more than one product...(The move to
an open platform) will be innovation across the board, not just one device."
T-Mobile, like other carriers, was leery of
platform that the search giant was pushing seemed radical and untested, Sims
said. T-Mobile is now a part of
Like T-Mobile,
Choudhury,
technologies. "But we got over that hurdle when we saw the use-case models,"
Choudhury said. "The Web-browsing, the taking and uploading of pictures."
Choudhury said he expects big changes to happen fast once the Android phones
get into consumers' hands. Nedim Fresko, director of strategic platform
initiatives at Blackberry maker
Mobile's release would be a "wake-up call for innovation."
But conference panelists differed on what areas of mobile technology - video
distribution, social networking, enterprise or entertainment - were likely to
heat up first.
"Security is the issue," Fresko said. "People want secure, managed and safe"
networks.
John Smelzer, a senior vice president and manager of
Entertainment Group Inc.'s interactive media division, said photo and video
distribution would be the "next killer app."
Jones Newswires.
Fox isn't immediately interested in moving social networks to mobile, Smelzer
said, but it sees great potential in start-ups working on applications that
replicate the broader online experience on handsets - for instance, middleware
companies, content aggregators, ad distributors and companies working on
encoding and transcoding data.
Subscription-based video has served Fox well, Smelzer said, and the company
plans to continue that model as networks and handsets move toward openness.
"For the long tail, we think it will be mobile Web," he said.
T-Mobile says all of its offerings will be tailored to the consumer, and the
consumer, in turn, will tell the carriers what they expect their mobile devices
to be able to do.
Panelists agreed that the major, inevitable changes in the next few years
won't be top-down changes, but will be a response from carriers to consumers,
who are going mobile in ever greater numbers and learning to expect much more
from their phones. In addition, they said, the time is ripe for innovators and
start-ups to deliver what consumers want in new, possibly lucrative ways.
"The college kids out there have all the ingredients, finally," said
senior vice president of Korean cellular service provider
"It's so easy and cheap for these kids to start new ventures," Kah said. "VCs
ought to look at very early-stage (companies), but the real winners (will be)
those that stick around a few years."
-By
[Via: Cnn.com]
