CTIA Day 2
I’ve got some good video footage — about 70 gig’s worth. Luckily I brought along my 1TB drive. My brand of choice? Western Digital. Although I’ve also got an Iomega 1TB back in London. You need that when you’re doing video.
Today was action-packed with meeting-after-meeting along with some impromptu connections with folk.
My modus-operandi, dear reader, is this. I turn up. I smile. I thrust forward my hand to the chap or lady I’m interviewing. I then present them with my somewhat oversized mega-memorable business card — it’s the size of a postcard and contains lots of information about Mobile Industry Review.
Then I check that they’re ok with me filming them. I expected quite a few people to be put off by me sticking a camera in their face, but no. Not once.
I’m looking forward to producing the output. It should make for interesting stuff.
So, to this morning.
Enter Pierre-Emmanuel Struyven, Chief Executive of Streamezzo. They’ve created a common platform (“Rich Media Software Suite”) that makes the developing of good looking, swish media services for mobile. I’ve got some good video of some examples from Pierre-Emanuel.
Next up was Alykhan (“Aly”) Govani of MX Telecom USA. Aly was recently appointed top dog in North America and as such, he was mobbed. Mobbed. We had a 1130am meeting but he was being pulled in five ways at once by a load of folk from all sorts of big companies when I arrived. Understandable. MX have alway been a hot property in the mobile space (they’re a leading provider of mobile aggregator services) — however they’ve clearly decided to up their public game. For years they’ve been terrifically well known amongst the closed circles of men sporting beards of questionnable origin (“Telecommunications Executives”) along with first edition Decon Blue LPs. You know. Uber telecoms geeks. It’s always annoyed me slightly that the wider market hasn’t necessarily known much about MX’s capabilities other than being the people who ‘make-the-text-system-work’.
There’s be a change of focus recently. They’ve pulled their finger out. I suspect it’s the top dudes (everyone in San Francisco seems to call each other ‘dude’) finally relenting on the marketing front. About time!
The net result? MX have a stand right next to Microsoft on the ground floor right by the entrance to the exhibition. So after you dodge the Microsoft groupies trying to persuade you that they CAN write a reliable operating system without having to have 7 goes (Version 7 just might work) – you’ll immediately hit the MX stand. Which is what a lot of folk are doing.
So I arranged to meet with Aly on Friday when it’ll be less busy.
I rocked up to Colibria in good spirits, eager to hear more about what they’re up to with Syniverse. Syniverse provides seamless mobile services for carriers — the concept being that most carriers operate with a heck of a lot of different (and usually incompatible, or annoyingly compatible) technologies and standards. As a consumer, I don’t give a toss. I just want my instant messenger to work, whether I’m in France, Belgium or Boise. Syniverse sort that out.
And speaking of Instant Messaging, Colibria are all over that. Multiple device messaging, multi-point, multi-everything. As Colibria CEO Keith Gibson explained, “The end-user doesn’t care whether the recipient of their message is online at home via MSN, on the bus or the like — they just want the message to get through.”
Colibria’s services, as well as offering the usual instant messaging facilities to mobile users, intelligently routes communications between your platforms as needed. So whilst you might be using IM to talk to someone, your messages could actually be being transmitted to the recipient as text messages — yet you’re able to chat away with your IM client. I haven’t seen this live yet but I’m looking forward to doing so.
I now need to sleep — but I’ve got conversations with the following in-the-can:
Naushad Huda, Textopoly co-founder
Robert Chavez, CEO of DIDMO
Thomas Garland, President, Snaptell
Mike Concannon, SVP Connectivity & Wireless, Qualcomm
Eric Lamarechai, Mobile Distillery
Orang Dialameh, Founder & CEO of iVisit
Paul Savage, Visibility Mobile CEO
Brian Lent, Chairman & CEO of Medio
Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO of hSenid
Nitin Bhandari, CEO of Skyfire
Plus our first look at the all new Blackberry Flip. Ooooh.
