I’ve been coming to CTIA and other similar events for something like ten years now.  During that time I’ve seen plenty of developments and more than my fair share of truly creative solutions to many of the challenges that have presented themselves to the developers of software for mobile communications devices.  Like every industry the mobile telecommunications industry has its own cyclic nature.  In the case of wireless it seems to me that this cycle consists of new technological ground being broken, early entrants race to bring their solutions to market, the most successful solutions achieve positions of market dominance, the largest players in the industry either acquire or duplicate the market leading technology and those same leading companies further affirm their positions atop the growing market.

This final stage in the innovation/consolidation cycle seems to have been the dominant theme of this year’s CTIA.  Over the past several years there have been a number of technologies that have been moving towards a more mature state - the principal one being mobile video.  While still to a certain degree being the province of the early adopter, mobile video has now matured sufficiently that it is reasonably accessible to just about any consumer in a primary market.

There are two different aspects to mobile video that have been maturing independently from one another; streaming video (and also downloadable video) distributed to mobile end-points via both specialized as well as undifferentiated services an example of the former being BlueApple.mobi while an example of the latter is YouTube.com, and live action video captured by the phone itself and they either broadcast in real time or uploaded to a number of websites for later viewing and archiving.

The second aspect of mobile video is somewhat less mature but still has a number of companies that are firmly on the road to becoming both ready for prime time as well as reasonably ready for a prime mainstream user experience.  Characterized by companies like Qik  and Flixwagon they are making it possible to stream live video directly from one phone to another (via the Internet) as well as from phone to PCs, Macs, or any other device with a fully functional web browser.

These interactive applications even let the viewers communicate with the person creating the video stream by allowing a sort of return instant messaging feature.  In the case of Qik a program that I frequently use to stream conferences to the web so that people can see them in real time, the software not only streams the content live, it also archives that content under my username and allows me to determine if I want to keep it private and allow only those people I expressly specify to view the content or make it public and allow anyone interested to view it.

Both Qik and Flixwagen allow individual videos to be embedded in other locations for example on your own blog or other personal page.  Neither of these applications allows you to deliver video of incredible quality and in my experience the audio is marginal at best but considering the amount of compression that must be taking place for this to work at all it is a pretty extraordinary thing to have turned your regular phone into a webcam a video camera or even a video telephone when you stop and think about it.

Aside from the above mentioned video end of things the only big change that is worth mentioning is the sheer number of developers that have begun to focus heavily on developing software for the iPhone.  The iPhone App Store is in many respects the biggest revelation in the mobile realm this past year even though it isn’t a true revelation at all with both Nokia (via their “Download” application) and the iPhone Dev Team with Installer.app both being earlier entries into this space.  Even though both Nokia and the iPhone Dev Team were there first and in the case of the Dev Team basically had developed an identical solution (in my opinion Apple took huge amounts of functionality and copied it exactly from the Dev Team’s work) the difference was that Apple had the ability to directly insert this new software into the millions of devices that were already in consumers hands as well as put in on the iPhone 3G in advance.

This gave them a huge bump up in terms of the number of people actually looking at installable third party applications for the device.  When combined with a brain-dead simple installation process for every application in the App Store, plus billing to your credit card exactly like the familiar iTunes this was a sure winner and this has been proven quite obviously with over 100 million applications downloaded and nearly $50,000,000 in revenues generated in just about three months.

The one key thing missing from this year’s CTIA was the one that everyone is anxiously awaiting; Google’s Android.  The first phone is slated to debut on September 23rd, courtesy of T-Mobile and HTC.  With a totally open, open-source operating system that purportedly allows the developer unfettered access to virtually every aspect of a device expecations are very high that we will see some truly remarkable software available for Android devices in short order.

I suppose this bodes well for the next CTIA coming in the spring of 2009.  I sure hope so anyway.  Going to these events and seeing the same tired hardware, the same tired booths and the same tired vendors gets…well…tiresome and leaves me feeling like I could have been doing something more productive then looking for something new and exciting when nothing new and exciting was in the offing.  At any rate, I am pretty certain that the next CTIA will be considerably more interesting that this one was.  Between Android,the iPhone 3G’s new applications once the developers have had more time with the SDK and some pretty cool stuff I’ve heard Nokia has up their sleeves, I am optimistic that 2009 will reverse the consolidation not innovation trend and I can start my report with the headline Innovation not Consolidation at Spring CTIA.  Here’s hoping anyway…

Tags: Events, Gadgets, Getting Things Done, Mobile, Oliver Starr, Software //