Worst of the Week: What to expect from The Big Show

Hello!
And welcome to our Thursday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCR Wireless News to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
So the CTIA Wireless 2007 show is just around the corner. Are you getting excited? I certainly am. I’m excited to visit sunny Orlando, where Mickey Mouse is the town mayor and rules with an iron fist from Fortress Epcot. And where my hotel for the CTIA show will undoubtedly be located at least five miles away from the convention center, with a convenient shuttle running between the two once every four hours exactly on the quarter hour, although it’s not clear which quarter. Ah, trade show season!
Thinking about the CTIA show also gets me excited because RCR Wireless News will be producing the CTIA Wireless 2007 Show Daily. This means that the entire RCR Wireless News staff (all 2,000 of us) will be holed up in a cramped, squalid workroom somewhere deep in the bowels of the Orlando convention center, feverishly banging out dozens of stories for the Show Daily-three days in a row. Lucky us!
But really it’s called March Madness because of the CTIA show, and in the spirit of madness, I’m going to offer some thoughtful, insightful and informed predictions about what we can all expect at the show.
ONE: A bunch of companies will announce a bunch of “solutions” at the CTIA show. It will be very unclear what exactly these “solutions” are because they will be described using PR/marketing lingo. Only a handful of very smart analysts and press people will be able to translate this lingo into regular human speech. Hopefully one of these smart people will be able to explain things to me.
Tip: If you’re going to announce a “solution” at CTIA . just don’t. Instead, call it what it is: a new base station, handset, chipset or Java application, for example.
Remember, only Chuck Norris offers real solutions, and they are only available in the form of roundhouse kicks.
TWO: Everyone and their mother will announce new music phones. All of these phones will be touted as the “iPhone killer,” and every handset maker will try to explain how their music phone is so much better than everyone else’s.
Tip: If you announce a music phone that does not include a cable that can connect the phone to a computer, at least 1 GB of memory, a good pair of earphones, stereo Bluetooth and dedicated external music buttons, IT IS NOT A MUSIC PHONE. It’s a cellphone that happens to be able to play music, but it is not a music phone. Thank you for your attention.
THREE: WiMAX will be the bomb diggity. You see, WiMAX is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are a subscriber!
Just give up already and embrace the sheer, utter beauty and wonder that is WiMAX. Indeed, WiMAX is better than sliced bread and you should love it more than your own mother. In fact, after the CTIA show, you will probably propose to WiMAX because you want to have a million of its babies, because that’s how much you will love it.
As for WiMAX news at the show, Sprint Nextel will probably announce delays in its planned WiMAX buildout.
FOUR: Cingular will announce that you should call it AT&T, and if you don’t call it AT&T it will sue your pants and shoes off and probably sue your mother too. Sucker.
FIVE: DVB-H vendor Modeo will announce that it doesn’t need the wireless industry, and it didn’t like the wireless industry all that much anyway. Instead, Modeo will probably announce a deal with a modem maker that will sell DVB-H cards for laptops, PSPs, iPods and other portable devices.
Then Modeo will buy Qualcomm’s MediaFLO business and make it do degrading things like eat dirt. Or something like that.
And finally, SIX: Matt Groening will come to Orlando to meet with me and sign my face. And he will announce that, yes, there will be a dedicated “Simpsons” mobile TV channel that will play every single episode ever made in a continuous loop, and that this channel will be available immediately on every cellphone in the world, including mine. Best. Announcement. Ever.
Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?
OK! Enough of that. Thanks for checking out this Worst of the Week column. And now, some extras:
–A company called Pet Lounge announced it will start offering pet-themed content including “ringtones, hip photographic and illustrated pet wallpapers, fashionable animated screensavers, fresh pet lifestyle text subscriptions and a cool range of pet-themed mobile games.” There are a number of hilarious things about this sentence, but let’s just focus on the adjectives for now: hip, fashionable, fresh and cool. Yup, those are DEFINITELY the adjectives I would use in describing pet-themed content for cellphones. Perhaps the only one I would add is “craptacular.”
–A Chinese mobile content company called “Hurray!” announced its fourth-quarter results, which showed a decline in Hurray!’s revenues and net income. The irony is so ironic.
–A mobile enterprise company called Vettro put out a press release titled “Mobile Applications’ Impact on Your Bottom Line.” Am I the only one who finds the title of this press release absolutely hilarious?
–Sony Pictures announced it will distribute “mobisodes” from the TV series “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” The mobisodes will feature “unbelievable and completely wacky humans” doing various unbelievable and completely wacky things. What exactly will they be doing, you ask? I’m guessing they’ll be eating bicycles, wrestling cobras, watching TV on their cellphones, eating at Arby’s, reading this column, and other crazy things like that.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at mdano@crain.com.