Enterprise, entertainment evangelism: CTIA keynoters look back and beyond 2007

ORLANDO, Fla.-A packed hall heard evangelism, exhortation and ebullience from a trio of industry speakers yesterday morning, as the CTIA Wireless 2007 trade show got underway. Attendees also got a surfeit of commercialism as each keynote speaker extolled their partners and their progress.
“The golden age of information and entertainment is upon us,” said Randall Stephenson, COO for AT&T Inc., which recently gained controlling interest of the industry’s largest operator Cingular. “Let’s remake the communications industry.”
According to Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of Research In Motion Ltd., who followed Stephenson onstage, his company has already accomplished this transformation.
Lazaridis cast back 20 years to a time when efforts to develop devices, services and networks faced fragmented standards, no software platforms and “every project had to justify its R&D investment.” One imagined dinosaurs roaming a primordial landscape.
“Even then,” Lazaridis intoned, striding a stage bookended by giant video screens, “we saw the value-that this technology would be important.”
The killer app, then as now, was push e-mail. RIM successfully resolved security issues and its work on push e-mail set the stage for all subsequent mobile data applications, Lazaridis said.
Fast forward to March 2007: Lazaridis ran through a dizzying procession of applications, graphically illustrated by the latest BlackBerry model and the logos of dozens of application partners. He ran through a list of vertical industries and organizations-financial services, government, law enforcement, healthcare-and a list of personal applications.
“The important theme here is we’ve achieved great things over the past two decades,” Lazaridis said. “Push, mobile e-mail led to all these applications we had not even imagined 20 years ago.”
The next Big Things would be enabled by social networking, e-commerce and location-based services that give “context” to the end-user’s handheld search for entertainment and productivity, Lazaridis said.
(Why stop there? Why not include enlightenment and prosperity?)
The enterprise potential for productivity would experience a revolution, enabled by GPS and LBS, he said.
Pieter Knook, senior vice president for mobile and embedded devices at Microsoft Corp., connected so many mantras that a single diagram of the result would resemble a tumbleweed. Work and personal life would be accessed by one mobile device and services that would “transcend the PC and mobile environment,” he promised. Naturally, Microsoft would drive that transcendence by pursuing open software that tapped the global developer community.
The promise of Web 2.0 meant matching the wireless, computing and Internet industries’ assets to “realizing the dream,” Knook said. Tangible evidence that all is possible could be found in the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, he said.
“The huge growth in devices helps spread Windows Mobile 6,” he said.
Best-selling devices at the nation’s largest carrier have contributed, he said, in keeping with the apparent theme of the morning that linked partners and progress. HTC’s new “Shift” device-larger than the biggest slab, smaller than the smallest laptop-would be a major contributor as it hits the market, Knook noted, cupping the device in his hands.
“Because we’re an open and standardized platform, we’ve enabled a host of applications across many devices,” Knook said.
Knook warned the network operators in the audience that data service plans remain too complicated, roaming rates remain “too opaque” and simplification would lead to widespread adoption.
“If we pull together, we can deliver on the promise of mobility at a reasonable charge,” Knook concluded.