CTIA: The Coming Tablet Revolution – It’s Not About the iPad

Yesterday’s “iPad and Tablets: Publishing and Entertainment” sessions at CTIA were an interesting experience. The main thing I took away from them is that some smart people with extensive mobile and computing industry experience believe tablets will be very big and will eventually largely replace netbooks and PCs. That was the message from several of the speakers including Zigurd Medniks who works with OEMs to adapt Android to a wide variety of devices and embedded systems. The reasoning is that … Continue reading

CTIA Day One Wrapup

Today was the first full day of CTIA.  I didn’t expect a lot of big announcements but I was wrong, there was actually a lot of news.  First up, Verzion announced its LGE rollout plans which are quite aggressive.  They plan to cover a third of the US population by year end with service lighting up in 38 cities and 60 airports.  PreCentral has the details including a list of the lucky cities and airports.  Verizon president and COO Lowell … Continue reading

Nokia Developer Day at CTIA

Update: The Developer Day presentations are now available online. I attended the Nokia Developer Day session  CTIA today.  The day long event started with  a mind boggling assortment of numbers demonstrating the the revenue opportunities that Nokia offers developers. Nokia’s much maligned Ovi Store as been redesigned  for better usability and app discovery. The improvements seem to be working. Traffic and downloads are up. The average visitor downloads 2.6 apps per visit, 8.5 per month for a total of 2.5 Million downloads per day. … Continue reading

Negroponte’s Ideal Tablet Concept

I heard Nicholas Negroponte speak at Mobilize today.  It was a zinger of a talk. He started by saying that since its founding in 2001, One Laptop per Child’s goal has been to deliver enabling technology in and only in areas where market forces couldn’t or wouldn’t. Although he started with laptops, Negroponte now believes that tablets are the best, most cost effective tool  for enhancing learning everywhere in the world. Negroponte’s described his ideal tablet as: Unbreakable Needs no … Continue reading

PayPal – Mobile Payments Should Replace, Rather Than Enhance Point Of Sale – Mobilize

The mobile payments panel at Mobilize was composed of payment company representatives. As expected they very bullish on mobile payments. With 5 billion mobile phones in the world compared with 2 billion credit cards, I think they have reason to be. PayPal’s Osama Bedier shared an interesting concept, He suggested that instead of thinking about replacing credit cards with NFC enabled phones at the Point of Sale (POS), we should instead be thinking about replacing the POS, which he called … Continue reading

A Busy Mobile Week Ahead in San Francisco

Mobile folks seemed to have figured out that San Francisco’s nicest weather is in late fall . At least that’s when most of the major mobile events seem to occur there. First came Mobile 2.0 and tomorrow marks the start over a week of mobile madness here in SF. Tomorrow I’ll be at GigaOm’s Mobilize. It was a great event last year and this year with its “The Future of the Mobile Web” theme and impressive line up of speakers … Continue reading

Making Money In Mobile – Issues and Strategy

Photo: Some rights reserved by AMagill One of the recurring themes at this week’s Mobile 2.0 conference was how exactly do you make money in mobile? It was the topic of a couple of panels but no clear answer emerged. In talking with other attendees during breaks I found a fairly high level of frustration about revenue opportunities in mobile. It’s not easy for free lance  app developers and mobile web publishers to make a living from their work. Most … Continue reading

Mobile 2.0 Business Day – The Yahoo Phone and Innovation From Africa and Asia

Yesterday’s session of the Mobile 2.0 conference was dubbed the “Business Day“.  The focus was on where the mobile industry is headed and how startups, mobile publishers  and other entrepreneurs can profit from the rapid cycle of  that has characterized mobile since its infancy. It was a long day with over a dozen presentations and panels.  Rather than trying to cover every one of them which would make for a very long post, I’m going to focus on the one … Continue reading