CTIA Wireless Wrapup
Last week, the SF mobile community dropped whatever they were doing and headed off to CTIA Wireless. The conference officially covers 4 days, if you include a day of preshow telecom university classes. But it is jammed packed with other sessions and parties. In addition to meetings and networking, I spent time at Location 2.0 and Mobile Jam. I recommend both highly.
Location 2.0 is sponsored by SiRF and others. Its focus is on mobile location and tracking. What I did not realize until I got there was that it included a pitch session for startups to discuss their take on location for the mobile device. Next time, Geogad will be entered for this competition. The big winner was DialDirections. Congratuations.
The Mobile Jam was held the last day of the conference. This was more of an unconference, free-flow event. This really attracted the hard core mobile people and/or the local mobile people. The highlight of the session was the announcement of a new mobile app platform from T-Mobile. It is designed to get mobile apps before the end customer with fewer headaches for both the carrier and the developer. The key is that T-Mobile seems to realize that they have trained the end user to call their support lines with all of their questions. This behavior is costly for the carrier and frustrating to the end customer and the developer. The new model going forward will be that the customer will realize that they need to call the app developer with any problems that they might have.
Gee, it sounds like the regular Internet and PC environment. Finally!