The other day I attended the Texas Wireless Summit 2006. It was a good event. The summit is a reltively small event but with a great set of (influencial) speakers that included Paul Struhsaker, Motorola, Dr. Sanjay Jha, QUALCOMM, Dr. Sandeep Chennakeshu, Freescale Semiconductor, Moris Simson, WaveNet, Inc., Ted Rappaport, and a number of panelists from Sprint Nextel, CTIA, NTIA, VCs and CEOs and many other — see the event program.
So what did I take away from the event?
Listening to the various leaders is always interesting — see what's on their mind, their vision, where they are heading to.
But the real validator for me was that mobile multimedia is the next big thing – not only all the companies understand this, but they are working towards it. I already knew mobile multimedia is the next big thing, but listening to the various leaders, and getting this validated is great.
Then there were the various schools of thought on wireless broadband, and on wireless personal networks technologies. Time, and the market, will tell who the leading technologies will be. For us software developers, the network hopefully remains 'transparent'.
In short, I am pretty satisfied to see how important mobile multimedia is going to be, and how everyone, from infrastructure to the upper layers, are all getting ready for it. And I'm not talking about Mobile TV only here. We are entering a new and unique phase in mobility. The futuristic visions from the last decade are now starting to happen. The networks are getting faster, and the bandwidth is greater, the handsets are getting to the point where they are advanced-enough and multimedia rich, and the software and how to program, both on the client and the server, the APIs and the services on the web, are also happening, allowing the development community the freedom to innovate, aggregate, mash-up, and bring products to market, as never before. Exciting times are ahead of us.
ceo