Happy Birthday IT

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Reality Check, a feature for RCR Wireless News’ new weekly e-mail service, Mobile Content and Culture. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile content industry to give their insights into the marketplace. In the coming weeks look for columns from Tom Huseby of SeaPoint Ventures, Laura Marriott of the Mobile Marketing Association and more.
Some may find it unseemly that I would use this space to write about a subject in which I have a vested interest, but to them I paraphrase what Winston Churchill said to his critics: Tough. (Of course, if you are not reading this, the editors at RCR Wireless News may have a different perspective than I on what is seemly and what isn’t.)
(Editor’s Note: We’ll allow it. this time.)
In a couple of weeks in San Francisco, CTIA will host Wireless IT and Entertainment 2007. As the person responsible for the educational programming, speaker selection, a large number of the keynotes (all the good ones), and even partly for its marketing direction since the show’s current iteration beginning in 1998 (it had an earlier iteration and a couple of shows as Wireless Apps), I feel that I have been one of the foster parents of the show. And like any parent who has watched his child go from toddling infant through troubled adolescent to thriving adult, I have a great deal of pride in all that the show has accomplished. But beyond my personal satisfaction, the show has been a true bellweather for the industry, and its success has been intricately linked with the industry’s.
The show’s current direction was born in the parking lot of the Vancouver Yacht Club in June 1998 when Dick Lynch, then EVP and CTO of Bell Atlantic, Kendra VanderMeulen, SVP at AT&T Wireless, David Sutcliffe, president and CEO of Sierra Wireless, and Chuck Parrish, EVP at then Unwired Planet (not yet Phone.Com and a long way from Openwave), who together comprised the officers of the Wireless Data Forum’s (WDF) board of directors, accosted Randy Granovetter, whose company, Microsoft, was the newest member of the WDF and who herself had responsibility for helping Microsoft develop its mobile strategy.
Lynch and VanderMeulen, particularly, were convinced that the fall show-which the WDF had birthed with CTIA as Wireless Apps-should be a customer-facing show, unlike CTIA’s spring show. To them, that meant attracting IT professionals, as the wireless data market, in their estimable opinion, was going to start with the enterprise. Microsoft’s first job, as the newest member of the wireless data community, was to use its relationships with IT professional to drive them to the show.
Thus began not just the transformation of the show, but Microsoft’s involvement with and support for the show at a time when the company had zero revenues from wireless data and when the products and networks for wireless data that they were being asked to tout-phones with four lines and 12 characters and a wireless data network with throughput speeds of 19.2 kbps and limited roll out of other 2G digital networks-paled in comparison to what was happening in the wireline world with the Internet. Microsoft’s involvement with and support of the show over the years has been one of the reasons for its success, and that involvement culminates this year on day one with a keynote address from the company’s President and CEO Steve Ballmer.
But I get ahead of myself.
In the spring of 1998, shortly after I joined CTIA in February, came Robert Mesirow, my colleague at CTIA with P&L responsibility for CTIA’s two shows. Undertaking to implement the new direction identified by Lynch, VandMeulen and company, and with Microsoft’s help and that of industry stalwarts like Andy Seybold, Rob changed the show’s name to IT and launched it in the fall of 1998 on the second floor of Bally’s Hotel and Casino in pre-Venetian Las Vegas. I think we had about 13 table-top exhibits. Like wireless data itself, the show was a money loser, and there were those on CTIA’s board of directors who thought it should be folded. Fortunately, there were those within CTIA, particularly its leader Tom Wheeler, who believed that wireless data would one day be a rocket ship for industry revenues, who fought successfully to maintain the show through its lean years.
In 1999, we decided to move the mountain to Mohammad and brought the show to San Jose, heart of the burgeoning Internet economy, where we kept it for two years. We upped the ante by including “& Internet” in its name, and I recruited Jeff Hawkins, who had just left Palm to start Handspring and was an icon in the Valley, and Bill Joy, mad scientist at Sun Microsystems, to do the keynote addresses. Hawkins kept a packed house spellbound as he demonstrated the magic that Bluetooth might bring the industry, wandering 30 yards off the stage and maintaining a connection, while Joy rhapsodized about the day wireless data would let him retrieve his wandering dog from across the Colorado mountains where he lived, or call his hotel elevator for him as he was leaving his room. Heady stuff.
The show’s most auspicious moment, however, and the start of the test of its staying power, came in 2001, when we moved it to a burgeoning hotbed of wireless, San Diego, and prepared to open in a far larger convention center. on Sept. 11. With everybody already in San Diego, and no place anybody could easily go the main stage was quickly re-configured with television monitors and for the next five days, those who had come, stayed together, distracting ourselves with wireless data while remaining glued to the developments via the TV monitors. Another wireless show, which was our main competition at the time, and that opened that same day in San Francisco, decided immediately to close. It never re-opened again. The fall field was ours, but the going was not going to be easier.
The show hunkered down in familiar convention territory after that, Las Vegas, where it survived the double-whammy of the post-9/11 economy, as well as the bursting of the Internet bubble, and uncovered the fact, through the network effects of SMS interoperability and the phenomenon that were monophonic ringtones, that the consumer and not the enterprise was going to be the first big market for mobile data. When the show moved to San Francisco in 2004, it added “& Entertainment” to its name, once again pointing the way the industry and the market were headed.
When the industry convenes in San Francisco the third week of October, the Wireless IT & Entertainment show will have come a long way since its modern birth on the second floor of Bally’s hotel. And if, in my opinion, it still has not reached the original goal of attracting all the IT professionals we had hoped, it has nevertheless reflected the growth and the direction of the wireless data market. And with attendance at the show expected to reach between 30% and 40% of our big show, it is reflecting the percentage that data revenues are becoming of total industry revenues as well. As someone who has been strapped to that rocket since the fuse was lit, I would like to thank all those like Dick Lynch and Microsoft, who have provided the fuel. Happy Birthday, IT. What a ride.
You may contact Mark directly at MDesautels@ctia.org. You may contact RCR Wireless News at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.