Seattle Mobile Monday May 10, 2007
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentWill be speaking at Mobile Monday on the 14th along with WSA Investment forum star ZenZui. Hope to see some of you there.
The May Mobile Monday Seattle will be held next Monday, May 14th. This month local “Zoomspace” creator ZenZui will be giving a demo and talking about their newly released mobile software. Also this month, mobile analyst Chetan Sharma will sharing recent mobile market research from his latest wireless industry report.
May presenters:
ZenZui is reshaping the way people interact with and use their mobile devices by marrying the power of the Internet with the personalization of the mobile phone. ZenZui tiles transform the handset and give users the power to acquire information, conduct transactions and share experiences quickly and easily.
Mobile Entertainment Summit May 9, 2007
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentFrom our friends at iHollywood Forum
KEYNOTES
FOX Interactive Media
John Smelzer
MediaFLO USA Inc.
Dan Novak
AT&T
David Okamoto
Verizon Wireless
Tammy Robinson
Whether your focus is mobile applications, advertising and marketing, content, enabling technologies, digital rights management, or investment, you can’t afford to miss the 12th Mobile Entertainment Summit May 23 and 24 in Los Angeles, CA. Not only is MES the world’s longest-running and largest mobile entertainment summit, it is the only event that provides personal access to the industry’s visionaries and business leaders as well as the newest technologies propelling the mobile world today. Don’t wait another day. Register by May 8th and get the early-bird discount!
It’s the one business summit you can’t afford to miss.
Accel Partners
Richard P. Wong
AT&T
Gregg Brown
Discovery
Doug Craig
Ericsson
Peter Laurin
go2
Lee Hancock
Handango, Inc.
Shawn Freeman
Handheld Entertainment
Jeff Oscodar
Intermedia Film Equities
Linda Benjamin
Ipsos Insight
Matt Kleinschmit
Iqzone, Inc.
Michael Bates
Javien
Leslie Poole
Konami
Joe Morris
Mozes
Dorrian Porter
Napster
Brad Duea
Navteq
Robert Gourdine
Neustar
Steve Granek
Newegg.com
Bob Bilbruck
News Over Wireless
Sam Matheny
Nixon Peabody LLP
Daniel Offner
Oxy Systems
Michael Krasner
PacketVideo
Joel Espelien
QUALCOMM Internet Services
Mike Yuen
SafeNet
Dr. Simon Blake-Wilson
Shozu
Mark Bole
Streamezzo
Pierre-Emmanuel Struyven
Televisa Digital
Eugenio Velasco
TeliaSonera AB
Kelly Odell
Virgin Mobile USA
Saj Cherian
Universal Mobile Music-US
Julie Lee
Univision Communications
Christopher Brunner
Walt Disney Internet Group
Stan Liu
For a full list of speakers please click here
Advertise in PiTech May 8, 2007
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentPiTech is a premier magazine produced by PanIIT, the joint alumini organization of the Indian Institutes of Technology. It is modeled after MIT Technology Review and is led by noted Prof. Nitish Thakor of John Hopkins. I am involved with the magazine as an editor, writer, and volunteer.
The upcoming July issue will be launched at IIT 2007 Alumini Summit in Santa Clara. Keynote speakers include Jeff Immelt, Hillary Clinton, Arun Sarin. Othe speakers are CMU President Jared L. Cohon, McKinsey’s Rajat Gupta, Keynote CEO Umang Gupta, uber VC Vinod Khosla, Headstrong CEO Arjun Malhotra, millionaire philanthropist Kanwal Rekhi, Bharat Petroleum CEO Ashok Sinha, iGATE CEO Sunil Wadhwani and other luminaries.
It is a great place to advertise, get in front of potential employees and partners, and gain visibility amongst the best and brightest in the industry.
Please let me know if you are interested.
Carnival over at 3-Lib
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentCheck out Steve’s listing of the best writings of the week.
Content Monetization - Challenges and Strategies
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentAnother great event coming up in Seattle courtsey of TiE Seattle.
The topic is Content Monetization - Challenges and Strategies. Great set of speakers esp. Keynote speaker Cole Broadman. He rarely speaks outside so this a great opportunity to get his views on the mobile industry.
Keynote Speaker
Cole Brodman, Chief Development Officer, T-Mobile
Moderator
Len Jordan, General Partner, Frazier Technology Ventures
Facilitator
Chetan Sharma, President, Chetan Sharma Consulting
Sandeep Sinha, Director, Motorola
Panelist
Brendan Benzing, VP of Products and Marketing, Infospace
Jai Jaisimha, VP Product Development, Medio Systems
Satoshi Nakajima, CEO, UIEvolution
Hank Skorny, Executive VP, Business Dev & Partnering, OZ Communications
The impact of KSR vs. Teleflex May 3, 2007
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentSupreme Court’s ruling recently on the case has very broad impact on the IP system in the US. Instead of discussing it in detail, i will point you to a good analysis on PatentlyO blog.
Though the Supreme Court’s unanimous reversal in KSR v. Teleflex, No. 04-1350, 550 U.S. ___ (2007), contains some harsh words for the Federal Circuit’s teaching, suggestion, or motivation (TSM) test, the decision itself appears to leave the TSM requirement roughly intact. Justice Kennedy’s opinion emphatically rejects an ‘explicit’ TSM test—one that would require explicit prior art teachings in order to combine given references in the obviousness analysis. At the same time, the decision appears to essentially recreate the ‘implicit’ or ‘flexible’ TSM test—one that would allow implicit suggestions, such as the nature of the problem, to provide the requisite motivation to combine. It is this implicit TSM requirement that represented current Federal Circuit doctrine, pursuant to several decisions published after certiorari was granted in KSR (e.g., In re Kahn, DyStar, & Alza). In fact, the Supreme Court even indicates that the Federal Circuit may have gotten it right in these post-cert cases. The KSR opinion is more a critique of the Circuit’s application of the obviousness (and TSM) standard to the specific facts in KSR than a critique of the need to rigorously (and expansively) evaluate what would lead a PHOSITA to combine certain references in the obviousness analysis.
In an another important case, Microsoft got away with the ruling on the case against AT&T which has wide impact for the company and the software/IT industry.
Screentonic is first to go
Posted by chetan in : AORTA, European Wireless Market, Microsoft Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, US Wireless Market, Worldwide Wireless Market , add a commentMicrosoft acquired Screentonic. They had earlier fiddled with Third Screen Media but decided to go with Screentonic - the European player, perhaps because of market access and value of that access. Similar to the Motionbridge acq though it wasn’t a good acq at all. ScreenTonic boasts partnerships with mobile operators in the U.K., France and Belgium markets; according to Microsoft, its “mobile expertise and industry relationships” will complement the software goliath’s Digital Advertising Solutions platform by providing advertisers with a range of ad formats, from display to text, as well as ad management and reporting capabilities.
WSA 2007 Investment Forum and Technology Showcase Roundup
Posted by chetan in : 3G, AORTA, Carriers, European Wireless Market, Japan Wireless Market, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Search, Mobile TV, Mobile Usability, Speaking Engagements, US Wireless Market, Wireless Value Chain, Worldwide Wireless Market , 2 commentsEarlier today, I had the pleasure to moderate and be the judge of two wireless panels at the WSA 2007 Investment Forum and Technology Showcase - kind of like final of the American Idol of the Tech world.
I also attended some of the other keynote panels. We will get to the panel discussion in a bit but first, the morning kicked with an exciting discussion between Mark Anderson, CEO, Strategic News Service and Peter Wilson, Engineering Director, Google. It was classic Mark. Readers might be familiar with Mark as the originator of the the term “AORTA” - the name of this blog.
with Mark Anderson
The whole Web 2.0 business model has thus far been around advertising, even with mobile and new UGC companies, it has been all about gathering eye-balls and monetize by advertising, and hope to God, one of the GYMs or perhaps media companies will buy them out. But this model can’t sustain, can it?. Mark and Peter beautifully captured the essence of the promise and the hype of the backbone of this model. Mark noted in his recent newsletter
For all the talk about Web 2.0 (thank you, Mr. O’reilly) and other toolkit changes, there is no money involved. Take all the social networking sites, and how exciting it is to have your own yearbook page with animation and lipstick, but - it’s still a pig. And the only way that pig looks even mildly attractive is because someone is trying to staple ad money to its left ear.
Google is clearly trying to broaden its revenue stream beyond advertising. Mark didn’t think Google’s approach of going after the enterprise customer is working and is unlikely to gain much momentum. Peter was upbeat about SAAS model and thought everytime someone uses a browser for an application over the net, the value of Microsoft’s franchise decreases. He was upbeat on UGC and Mashups and thought it will create tremendous opportunities.
Mark, Jeremy, and Peter
Mark is really good at analogies and coming up with good acronyms. He likened the advertising business to the river of money and everyone wants to tap into it. Mark warned that too many companies are going after advertising business while agencies are going to gravitate towards top 3-4 players, just like in other mediums. He suggested companies should focus on real customers and real money rather than hope for acquisition by GYM. He thought security is going to be a big issue in a broader sense of the word.
Stuck between the two was Trumba’s founder Jeremy Jaech who concurred with Mark that the best seats along the river of money are already taken and it is hard to make money from advertising. They toyed with the idea initially but soon moved to creating value through traditional means - selling to the enterprise.
In terms of new things coming, everyone agreed, mobile is the place to be and Seattle is the mecca for mobile innovation. Mobile as a pay device and collaborative software apps are things to watch for.
It was a great panel discussion with good provocative discussion.
Back to my panels.
The two wireless panels were:
Funding Pitch - Morning Panel
Panelists
Reed Thorkildsen, Vice President of Technology and R&D, Infospace Jodi Sherman Jahic, Principal, Voyager Capital
Adrian Smith, Principal, Ignition
Presenting Companies
Mixxer’s (CEO - John Dearborn) Mobilizer Widget allows users to share content, such as photos, across any U.S. wireless carrier. With just a click, people can send pictures, videos and even original music recordings to virtually any cell phone. Friends can turn pictures into wallpaper or watch funny videos on their mobile phone from anywhere, without having to log on to their computer. Mixxer also gives people the ability to “tweak” their Mobilizer Widget to better match the look and feel of their personal webpages.
Mobile Semiconductor Corporation (CEO - Cameron Fisher) is a design company dedicated to supplying a complete, differentiated, high-performance memory solution for smart phones and 4G video enabled handsets in the wireless market. Present memory elements of cell phones are comprised of numerous discrete components such as non-volatile Flash memory and volatile DRAM memory connected with multiple bus communication protocols. Mobile-Semi’s approach relies on a different architecture, combining these elements into a single memory system package containing multiple silicon layers that supply all internal memory requirements. The result is a small size form factor, greatly increased performance, and low power consumption.
Treemo (CEO - Brent Brookler) provides a Real Time Social Media Platform (SMP) that leverages the immediacy of mobile social media to consume, produce, manage and distribute user generated content of all types across multiple media including mobile and Web. The Treemo platform and technology is showcased on Treemo.com, a site that allows users to easily create personalized “channels” either via their PC, or through the mobile phone. The platform allows media to be embedded on external websites such as social networks, blogs and news sites, and it can also be skinned under a different brand as a white label solution.
and the Sales Pitch Panel - Afternoon Panel
Reed Thorkildsen, Vice President of Technology and R&D, Infospace Robert Gary, Executive Director of Product Realization, AT&T
Steve Wood, Chairman, SinglePoint
Presenting Companies
Ontela (Director - Mike Acuri), Inc. provides technology infrastructure to wireless carriers. Ontela’s service delivers camera phone photos instantly to consumers’ PCs and favorite Web sites as soon as the image is taken. Ontela’s PicDeck platform enables wireless carriers and Image Service Vendors (ISVs) to deliver new image applications to their customers. The PicDeck technology automatically delivers every picture taken on a camera phone to the user’s PC and favorite imaging Web sites while remaining invisible to the user. Ontela licenses its services to wireless carriers, enabling them to monetize their networks and relationships with ISVs – Ontela does not provide its technology directly to consumers.
Perlego Systems (COO - Todd Ostrander) provides hosted, on-demand Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions allowing for the deployment, management, backup and restoration of mobile devices for the entire mobile value chain. Currently about 2M devices as install base.
ZenZui (Cofounder - John SanGiovanni) represents an entirely new way for consumers to discover and interact with the mobile web that is redefining the mobile advertising and marketing paradigm in the process. With ZenZui, your phone screen is a portal into your own customized Zoomspace, an information landscape of personalized, cached content presented in a compelling, easy-to-use, interactive visual interface. ZenZui’s core technology brings advanced information visualization techniques out of the research lab, onto mobile phones, and into the hands of mobile operators, marketers and consumers. ZenZui’s high-frame rate zooming user interface employs up to 36 individual Tiles that are selected and customized by the user to reflect their interests and lifestyle with relevant content, interactive communications, and fresh data. From the connected communities of social networks, and the latest sports and weather info, to the fun and immediacy of pop culture, and much more – this modular Tile interface lets users sync, surf, and share digital content quickly, easily, and in a totally new way.
Each presenting company had 10 minutes to pitch, 10 min for panel/judge Q&A and then some time for follow-up questions and feedback to the companies. It is not easy to cram all you want to say in 10 minutes but i guess that’s the test especially if you are pitching to the VCs.
The three panelists and I as a moderator got to rate the company on company’s management team and idea, market potential, and product features. One company won each category and there was also a grand prize for overall presenting company (there were two other presentation tracks - Web Services/Software and Digital Media, so total of 6 tracks).
Mobile Semiconductor won in the morning panel and Zenzui wowed us in the second one. Zenzui also won the overall prize for the best presenting company. I will be talking more to John and the management team in the coming days and will report back. I have been bullish on the concept of piecing together different pieces of content (mashups and widgets) coming into a single UI experience. Zenzui is a good incarnation of that philosophy and these guys know their stuff, really well.
With John SanGiovanni
Larry Orr, Managing GP of Trinity Ventures gave the luncheon keynote and went into some detail about his love for Seattle companies, discussed Starbucks, BlueNile, and Wall Data at length and did a Letterman like top 10 number on “Top 10 reasons to invest in Seattle: A Silicon valley perspective”
Overall, it was great to moderate panels with great panelists and presenting companies and mingle with who’s who of Seattle venture community and passionate entrepreneurs including James Sun of Zoodango (the apprentice guy). Seattle remains the hotbed of mobile and new technologies emerging from the shadows of the giants.
Upcoming Events May 1, 2007
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , add a commentHope to see some of you guys at these events
2 May
WSA Investment Forum 2007. Chetan will be moderating two panels on Wireless. Funding pitch by Mixxer, Mobile Semiconductor Corporation and Treemo and Sales pitch by Ontela, Perlego Systems, and Zenzui
16 May
Zino Society, Seattle Chetan will be giving a keynote address to a group of investors on Wireless Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges
16 May
PAN-IIT, Seattle Google Kirkland Campus Software as a Service
16-17 May
MEF, Los Angeles
May
EMC and CSC on Wireless data markets. Chetan will be partnering with EMC to give a seminar on Wireless Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges. If you would like to schedule a briefing for your organization, please contact us
31 May
TiE, Seattle, Mobile Content Monetization The event includes senior executives from T-Mobile, Infospace, Medio, OZ, and UI Evolution. Chetan will be facilitating the event.
26-29 June
Global Wireless Security, Kuala Lumpur Chetan will be presenting to a gathering of CTOs and CIOs on Wireless Security Trends and Best Practices
6-8 July
IIT 2007 Global Conference, Santa Clara
22-25 Aug
iHollywood China, Beijing
2 Oct
Zino Society, Seattle Chetan will be giving a hands-on class to a group of entrepreneurs on How to protect your Intellectual Property
4-6 Oct
World Cyber Games 2007, Seattle
In addition, Chetan will be doing some private briefings to carriers, content providers and enterprise solution providers
Carnival over at Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition
Posted by chetan in : Mobile Advertising , add a commentDorrian Porter does a great job of summarizing last week’s best writings on mobile. Check them out.
