But some disagree on where start-ups should focus their efforts if they aim to make money in this fast-changing landscape.
At
the Wireless Innovations 2008 conference in Redwood City, Calif.,
sponsored by Dow Jones & Co., Joe Sims, vice president and general
manager of T-Mobile's broadband and new business division, said he had
already seen prototypes of the company's Android-based phone, which are
scheduled to ship in this year's final quarter.
(This story also
appeared in Venture Wire, a newsletter published by Dow Jones & Co.
that covers the venture-capital industry.)
"I'm impressed," he
said. "We will have more than one product...(The move to an open
platform) will be innovation across the board, not just one device."
T-Mobile,
like other carriers, was leery of Google at first, because the open
platform that the search giant was pushing seemed radical and untested,
Sims said. T-Mobile is now a part of Google's Open Handset Alliance, as
is chip maker Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM).
Like T-Mobile, Qualcomm was
"skeptical" of Google's plan at first, said Sayeed Choudhury,
Qualcomm's vice president of product management for CDMA technologies.
"But we got over that hurdle when we saw the use-case models,"
Choudhury said. "The Web-browsing, the taking and uploading of
pictures."
Choudhury said he expects big changes to happen fast
once the Android phones get into consumers' hands. Nedim Fresko,
director of strategic platform initiatives at Blackberry maker Research
in Motion Ltd. (RIMM), predicted T- Mobile's release would be a
"wake-up call for innovation."
But conference panelists differed
on what areas of mobile technology - video distribution, social
networking, enterprise or entertainment - were likely to heat up first.
"Security is the issue," Fresko said. "People want secure, managed and safe" networks.
John
Smelzer, a senior vice president and manager of News Corp.'s (NWS) Fox
Entertainment Group Inc.'s interactive media division, said photo and
video distribution would be the "next killer app."
News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.
Fox
isn't immediately interested in moving social networks to mobile,
Smelzer said, but it sees great potential in start-ups working on
applications that replicate the broader online experience on handsets -
for instance, middleware companies, content aggregators, ad
distributors and companies working on encoding and transcoding data.
Subscription-based
video has served Fox well, Smelzer said, and the company plans to
continue that model as networks and handsets move toward openness.
"For the long tail, we think it will be mobile Web," he said.
T-Mobile
says all of its offerings will be tailored to the consumer, and the
consumer, in turn, will tell the carriers what they expect their mobile
devices to be able to do.
Panelists
agreed that the major, inevitable changes in the next few years won't
be top-down changes, but will be a response from carriers to consumers,
who are going mobile in ever greater numbers and learning to expect
much more from their phones. In addition, they said, the time is ripe
for innovators and start-ups to deliver what consumers want in new,
possibly lucrative ways.
"The college kids out there have all
the ingredients, finally," said J.H. Kah, senior vice president of
Korean cellular service provider SK Telecom Co. (SKM).
"It's so
easy and cheap for these kids to start new ventures," Kah said. "VCs
ought to look at very early-stage (companies), but the real winners
(will be) those that stick around a few years."
source
