Several members of the Fresh Team had the exciting chance to attend the 2008 CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas. The show was amazingly huge, walking the show end to end was a task in itself, with exhibitors ranging from manufacturers, wireless hardware, software, entertainment, content, aggregators, and on and on. The Las Vegas convention center was a great venue to house such a large show in, allowing plenty of space for the event itself as well as ample meeting areas. In comparison to March 2007 event in Orlando, this show was noticeably larger, a great sign that despite a possible US recession, the mobile industry worldwide continues to see great growth and potential.

From the perspective of mobile content management, detection, delivery, and marketing management - we were surprised to see very little new innovation compared to what we saw six months ago. Most of our competitors were more or less pitching the exact same product or service. In comparison, over the same 6 month period we had a very productive cycle and have continued to innovate our mobile platform in the areas of device detection and content delivery, as well as extending the marketing and reporting availability for an operational client.

Content developers continue to push out extremely popular J2ME games, which have helped content sales continue upward, despite stale performance with ringtones. This was also recently covered by Mobile Entertainment magazine. Of interest to Fresh was the XM/Blackberry collaboration on launching an application (link) which allows users to listen to their favorite XM Stations on most newer Blackberry’s. The subscription based service (using Bango) is a great example of a company taking advantage of what they already have, to successfully enter the mobile space.

There seems to continue to be a challenge getting the carriers to become more prominent at these events. With respect to the mobile Internet, they are the gatekeepers, and the show was tens of thousands of people telling you how they were going to get past the gate. On the flip side, this feeling of being locked out is diminishing; either because we accepted the current state of off-deck mobile, or carriers and manufacturers are loosening their grip just enough to see the ramifications of fully opening up. Only time will tell.

Overall, from what we’ve seen at CTIA and knowing where we stand, we are very comfortable with the development schedule we have laid out in continuation of the ever improving Fresh Mobile Platform. Our clients have, and continue to provide us ‘from the trenches’ feedback, allowing us to rapidly deploy features and updates to fulfill the needs of our ever evolving clients in a rapidly changing industry. Be sure to stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date with new features, research, and results!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Mobile Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.