On Tuesday night I was in a panel discussion on "What’s In Your Pocket? The Future of Portable Communication" as part of the MIT Club of Northern California Entrepreneurship series (which is open to the public). It attracted a full house with only a week of advertising and an entry fee, so apparently there is a decent bit of interest in the topic, in the food, and in entrepreneurial networking.

Moderator

• Julie Ask, Senior Research Director, JupiterKagan

Panelists

• Jory Bell, Founder, OQO
• Jason Loia, COO, Digital Chocolate
• Michael Rayfield, General Manager, NVIDIA Handset Group
• Susie Wee, Director, HP Labs Mobile and Media Systems Lab
• David Witkowski, Consultant and VP, Wireless Communications Alliance

Julie did a great job leading the discussion and she kickstarted with some piercing questions to make the panelists "get real" from the start. She sprinkled in some very interesting statistics on the consumer usage of mobile applications in the U.S. Unfortunately, these stats bring us to the sobering reality that mobile services are going to be slow to take off in the U.S. market.

Here are a few of the main points I captured:

Jory showed OQO's cool new device, the model 02. He stressed the importance of great design, stating that today's devices "suck". He also waved a flag for moving the industry towards fully capable devices and open platform architectures.

Jason discussed the importance of developing applications (such as games) that are specifically targetted for mobile devices, rather than retrofitting today's existing applications. He also argued that people don't want to walk around talking with a small computer on the side of their head, favoring a cell phone form factor. Jason also pointed out that most people don't even know what features and capabilities their phones have today.

Michael described NVIDIA's newest multimedia (audio/video/graphics) chipsets that are being integrated in portables (think low-power GPUs)- future devices are going to be a lot more capable. He also stressed the importance of giving people a great user experience.

David discussed the trends in wireless, questioning the viability of Mobile WiMAX deployments in the face of a nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi install base. David expands on this in his own blog post. He also expressed that the enterprise segment will be important in driving forward the mobile market.

I talked about how we need to get the ecosystem of content providers, service providers, network operators, and device manufacturers to work together, so we should move towards open platforms with more capabilities and open APIs- where the platform includes devices and infrastructure. I also tried to stress the importance of looking globally to see what works in other countries. And, I mentioned that in the future more and more sensors will be integrated in mobile devices, so applications should be developed accordingly. I also mentioned a few cool HP Labs projects.

Julie kept us real as she kept reminding us about what most of today's US consumers really want- free phones and cheap minutes. And, since operators need to subsidize free phones and cheap minutes for the majority, it will be tough for them to offer innovative new services for a small percentage of the population.

Some of the controversial issues:

• Is it true that people only want free phones and cheap minutes? If so, is the "user experience" really all that important?
• Do people in the U.S. really want new features or services? If so, what new application or service do people want? There was some agreement that social networking services like MySpace and Facebook could be very relevant here.
• Will the mobile market be driven from consumers or enterprise customers?
• What role does the network operator play in the future? Should they be allowed to differentiate service levels (the old net neutrality debate)?

For all readers:

• What are your thoughts?
• Do you have any questions?

For those who attended the event:

• What did you think the main points were?
• What were your takeaways?
• What did you think about the event?

Tags: mobile, communication, portable, device, mobile services, mobile applications, HP

Feel free to include a URL in your comments.

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Posted 03-22-2007 7:39 PM by susie.wee