State0 Blog

Photo taken by Gaetan Lee

I spent the last couple of days at the Texas Wireless Summit. Great event with numerous industry leaders and entrepreneurs. My company BarZ Adventures was kind enough to sponsor me to go. I attended once before in 2004. The event has grown quite a bit since then. The general theme this year was Open: Open Networks, Open Platforms, Open Operating Systems… Every session started with a different definition of the term open and was followed by conversations of the market’s movement toward openness. Here are the areas where I see real change toward openness:

• Open Networks: Wednesday was highlighted by a keynote given by Tony Lewis. He is the VP of Open Development at Verizon Wireless. He made some very aggressive claims about where they were planning to take Verizon. He repeated a number of times that the focus was on the network. Then he presented plans to allow manufacturers and OEMs to certify devices for use on their networks within a 4 week time frame. That process would drastically reduce the time to market for new technology in the wireless space. It would also give access to a powerful network. Combining this kind of model with the advent of LTE will blow the roof off of a wide range of applications. Yesterday, John Donovan, CTO of AT&T made allusions to similar plans but made no concrete claims to an Open LTE.
• Open Operating Systems: Google’s Android is the obvious leader and is causing a market shift. Nokia has followed close behind by purchasing the rest of Symbian and opening up the Symbian Foundation. Mark Louison, President of Nokia Inc., gave a keynote yesterday at the summit and explained that he felt the half billion dollar purchase was a smart move because advancing the industry would necessarily advance Nokia. It is certainly true that when you own the OS, you own the market, even if you have to open source to do it.
• Open Platforms: Iphone is the big winner here. They have created the perfect platform for developers. Donovan did not make many comments to this effect because he had no need to. However, Mark Louison was eager to point out that Symbian had many more applications and a larger number of developers worldwide. Across the board, there is a definitive move towards letting developers in. The greatest hurdle here is going to be enabling developers to develop across the 5+ major platforms more easily.

Of everything I soaked up from the gathering, this one point was, pleasingly, most apparent: The time has come for application developers to reign in the mobile space! Everyone from every panel agreed that the day has gone where networks control the market. They are no longer the lone value provider. There were many who were skeptical about how the shift would play out. The most common flaw cited was support structures. How will networks shift support costs to application developers? My thought is that networks need to help application developers create brands and own customers. This will be best for everyone. Whatever the case is, the change will happen whether the support structures are ready or not. Clearly, it is time for innovation to come from the venture laborists!