Innovation may get pushed onto industry

For a show that bills itself as a bleeding-edge event with a multiple personality disorder (One Show. Two Personalities.) last week’s CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Francisco was exceedingly tame.
A disappointingly placid Steve Ballmer of Microsoft took center stage for the opening keynote, introducing a mobile-device management suite. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz used his turn at the microphone to unveil a widget-that’s right, a widget-for BlackBerry devices. And AT&T Mobility and Napster brought out Matchbox 20’s Paul Doucette (who?) to tout a new, over-the-air download feature of the carrier’s mobile music service at Monday’s Mobile Entertainment Live.
Got goosebumps yet?
A week after Ballmer’s address, I’m still trying to figure out what to take away from the show. Most of the I.T. shows I’ve attended seemed to have a kind of overriding theme: Mobile advertising was the rage last year, as Sprint Nextel Corp. became the first U.S. carrier to sell advertising inventory on its deck. The buzz surrounding wireless video was deafening in 2005, and mobile music was the focus three years ago as carriers began to see flattening ringtone revenues.
This year was different, though. There was talk of mobile ads, to be sure, and both music and video got some attention. Mobile social networking was the topic of many conversations, and there was plenty of talk about enterprise offerings.
But there was precious little innovation on display. Attendees saw almost nothing they hadn’t before, both in terms of technologies and business models. While Moskovitz spoke convincingly of the need for carriers to operate more “open” networks, there is little evidence those words resonated with the tier-ones.
There is plenty of innovation occurring elsewhere in the industry, though. Steve Jobs is aggressively taking his iPods mobile, both with the iPhone and the iPod touch-which, of course, isn’t tied to a carrier. And Google Inc. in November finally might address its plans in wireless, according to the Wall Street Journal, with plans to unveil a line of phones in the next two weeks.
So while last week’s show may have fallen short of expectations, there’s no lack of innovation and experimentation in wireless. That “openness” that Moskovitz spoke of may be forced onto carriers by customers. Which could make for a very interesting show next time around.