Mobile Breakfast Series – What’s up in 2011? December 12, 2010
Posted by chetan in : US Wireless Market , trackbackWe hosted our 5th and final Mobile Breakfast Series event for 2010 on Dec 8th. As usual, it was a full house and great discussion. The theme of the morning was what’s going to be hot in 2011, the trends that will keep us on our toes for the year. Thanks to our outstanding speakers and an engaged audience, the program was excellent. Thanks also to our sponsors - Motricity, OpenMarket, and, WDSGlobal for supporting the program.
The panelists were:
Frank Barbieri, Founder and Chief Product Officer, Transpera (moderator)
Russ McGuire, VP - Strategy, Sprint
Jim Ryan, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer, Motricity
Ross Spearman, VP – Technology, Ericsson
Jonathan Ebinger, Partner – Blue Run Ventures
Andy Hickl, CTO, Kiha
The mobile value chain was well represented with Frank leading the conversation. Here is the summary of the discussion:
- Android will become the number 1 platform for developers. Units are already ahead of others, gradually, the revenues will start flowing as well. Reach is king
- Fragmentation is here to stay, get used to it
- Small developers will continue to harness the power of the ecosystem but making it into a big success is difficult as ever
- HTML5 will start to take some traction out from pure native apps
- In-app transactions is a growing healthy business
- RIM and Nokia will have a tough year
- Windows Mobile has a long road ahead but don’t count them out and they are likely a good candidate for the third spot behind Apple and Android
- It is still debatable if Isis will be a success. It might be better to work with Visa/Mastercard than against them
- Ericsson thinks about increasing the capacity 1000 times to address the 50 billion connections opportunity by 2020
- Spectrum acquisition continues to be an issue but we need to come up with other solutions to address the capacity crunch
- There are new opportunities using social and local that will create new investment opportunities
- Operators provide trusted relationship with the customers. Carrier billing is important to the ecosystem
- Industry keeps vacillating between operator as a smart pipe vs. dumb pipe. Different operators will have various strategies to compete
- The world of mobile looks different outside the walls of North America. Featurephones rule outside the US
- Online usage was driven by “more-is-good” mantra, mobile is not the same same. Things need to be more relevant in the mobile experience
- When it comes to the capacity crunch, it is just not the speed, but also throughput capacity and signaling that matters
- Cloud computing offers new opps as well as lowers the cost to launch a startup
- Apple will keep coming up with products that we don’t we don’t know we need yet but will love them when they come out
- The minimum expectation of the speeds is the max speed the users have experienced. It is hard to go back from broadband, experience is just different
- Tiered pricing is here to stay
- .. and much more
Thanks all for a great morning and a perfect end to our event series for 2010. We have exciting programs planned for 2011. Stay tuned.
We also announced that we will be doing our extremely successful Mobile Future Forward – the day long program again in Sept 2011. More news to come on that front. If you are interested in supporting the MBS series or MFF, please get in touch.
Finally, as is the tradition, we are are conducting our annual Mobile Industry Predictions survey for 2011 where we invite our industry friends and colleagues to opine on how things will emerge in the next year. This tends to be the best way to get a grasp on the trends for next year.
Hope you will participate by filling out a quick survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/mobile2011
We are giving out 10 copies of our popular and limited-edition Mobile Future Forward book. Please fill out the survey by Dec 24th.
Results will be published during the first week of Jan.
Until next time, wish you and your family a very safe and happy holiday season. Be healthy, do good work, and enjoy life.
Happy New Year
Chetan
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[...] geek and Consultant Extraordinaire Chetan Sharma treats us with a write-up of his last 2010 iteration of his Breakfast series, sharing a wealth of outlooks to [...]