Day One... CTIA
I’ve just got back from an array of parties and I shall shortly begin to piece the content and coverage together into a viewable and publishable form.
Our team is going international tomorrow. That is: Ben Smith flies out to Beijing and James Whatley heads off to the ‘mothership’ (as he calls it — Nokia Central in Helsinki).
Why Nokia decided to hold their get-together during the same week as CTIA, I don’t know. I’d have loved to have gone along and put some viewpoints to the team there.
I had an interesting time at the Nokia event this evening. There was a good turn out and their North American Chief Executive did his best to paint a positive picture of the marketplace in the region. (“We’re launching a phone with Verizon shortly,” “Rogers will take our Ovi services”). Nokia is nowhere in the States and that’s it. Period. Thanks for coming. I filmed his piece so I’ll put it up soon. Make up your own mind from his body language.
At ShowStoppers I bumped into old friends DeviceAnywhere and got some good overview video footage from them. I connected with Cascada’s top chap and was rather impressed to see they’d already created a demo Mobile Industry Review application for us here. I’ve got footage galore.
Then i packed away the camera and headed to the VSC Consulting ‘Ocean’s 30’ meal on the waterfront at Embarcadero. This featured (tellingly, from the event name) 30 of the most influential, talented mobile geniuses on the planet, in one room. A chap from Reliance. A chap from RIM. A chap from Buzzd. A chap from a leading venture capitalist.
Vijay spotted me as I arrived and plugged me into a chap sat opposite me, “This is Omar Hamoui… Omar, meet Ewan,” said Vijay.
“Hi Omar, what is it you do?” I asked politely and … yes, rather stupidly.
“I’m with AdMob,” he says. My eyes light up.
“Big fan, BIG BIG fan,” I tell him.
“What do you do with AdMob, Omar?” Was my follow-up dumb question.
To his credit, Omar took my question with super grace and explained that he was the founder.
Right.
Nice one, Ewan.
I.. er.. I knew this. I just didn’t connect Omar to AdMob *in person*.
I did present him with a really cool Mobile Industry Review flyer though. They’re going down a storm. They’re postcard sized and feature a rather large can’t-miss-it MIR logo on one side and then some site information on the back. There’s also a screengrab from the MIR television Show featuring our very own Dan Lane, Ben Smith and James Whatley. I heard lots of tales about Whatley actually. None of them publishable.
I bumped into Raj from Skyfire who — like many — follows the Mr Operator series here on MIR. He was particularly taken with Mr Operator‘s recent discourse and total annihilation of WiMax as a going concern. (I note Intel and other WiMax proponents have yet to supply a response to that piece).
Alex Andronikov (his business card says ‘Chief Mobilizer, CEO’) of MoVoxx took me through his rather extensive SMS marketing business. He’s done it the right way.
“We went straight to Madison Avenue,” he tells me, “That’s where the money is.”
Nice one. They’re delivering brilliant results, using text as the point of contact for their clients. They’ve developed an astonishingly large opted-in profiled base of North American consumers.
I sat down for a moment next to Brad Witteman, COO and Co-Founder of SkyClix. They’ve come up with a rather cool method of querying information via audio. As their site puts it:
SkyClix lets consumers get the information they want, when they want it. Using the ubiquitous mobile phone, consumers can dial #SKY (#759), hold the phone near a speaker and get connected with advertisers, stations and music.
Listening to a track you like on the radio? Dial 759 and you’ll get pushed to a mobile web page with an array of information and options including the ability to bookmark the song in iTunes for later perusal. Love it.
Amit Khanduja is the Executive Vice President of Jump Games. One word for you: Reliance. Yes, Reliance, the massive Indian powerhouse, are the folks behind Jump. Amit’s on the hunt for relevant companies to acquire and do business with. I’m going to see if I can do a profile of Amit himself and find out a lot more about what Jump are doing.
“Moderati licenses, produces and distributes awesome mobile content. We’re responsible for the good stuff on your phone!” — So says their site and I don’t doubt it. I had an all too brief chat with Cindy Lundin Mesaros, SVP Marketing at Moderati. I’ll need to see if we can get Cindy on a special report podcast or the like soon. They’re doing some excellent work in mobile content.
If I can get back to the hotel room early tomorrow night, I’ll get some video up…
