Topic: Mobile and Wireless
Andreessen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz discusses trends and possible future investments, beginning with an overview of past paradigm shifts in the world of technology. Although Horowitz cautions that the possibilities in the future are hard to guess beyond broad categories and general trends in the market and computer usage, he gives several examples of profound shifts in technologies, businesses, and overall trends.
Telecom innovation has been stagnant for too long. Andy Abramson of Comunicano, Inc. leads this panel of experienced analysts and strategists to explore what or who is holding the industry back: regulators, vendors, technologies, or markets? Are telecom legacies like seven digit phone numbers and copper wires impeding new possibilities, and if so, is it technology or psychology that prevents us from moving forward?
Agilent's lead technologist offers predictions for 3GPP LTE cellular technology. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is not a done deal, he explains, because its performance advantage is not yet proven. It has to be economically viable. The future of wireless is bright, but it has to be based on low-cost, low complexity technology. In the end, Rumney says, watch out for WiFi, because it is delivering where cellular isn't.
In the future consumers may have lower costs for services they demand but at the cost of their privacy and attention, while private enterprise will benefit from a wide variety of customers and more expansive relationships with those customers. Martin Geddes imagines the public will soon be ready to receive billing and customer service notices via pay-per-moment options added to Twitter or other social media instead of through today's minute-based telephony.
Three business chiefs reiterate that relationships are the most important assets -- so handling customer data is critical business. As internet marketing continues to grow, chief marketers have more data than ever on their customers. Here, top marketers talk about their data assets and how it directs company actions. Nikesh Arora of Google, John Hayes of American Express, and Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft talk with John Battelle.
"Telephony is dying and voip is not much better off". Where are telecommunication companies to look to next? Colin Pons, Senior Architect at KPN, thinks it's in enterprise applications, social networking services and mobile devices. The future of mobile is bright. The future of the internet is mobile.
Victor Kuo talks about how he has developed radio communication that can handle many transmitters sending at the same time. He has focused on the crosstalk problem, which was a major obstacle to using radios for module to module communication. Parallel wireless radio communication architecture will be a very powerful tool because it can handle the communication in a range of distances from global communication to near distance. This method can also could be used to communicate when the modules are connected.
The global television system is a half-trillion dollar business, leading Peter Chernin to say the cable business is "one of the great business models of all time." It is not surprising then that traditional television companies are nervous about new technologies, such as Netflix and Google TV, looking to secure content rights. Television companies must sharpen their game to maintain their 50 to 90 percent profit margins in the forthcoming digital age.
The ever changing mobile devices landscape throws up enormous challenges and opportunities alike for carriers like AT&T. In this conversation with O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly, John Donovon, the Chief Technology Officer of AT&T discusses the evolution of mobile networks in these challenging times. From net neutrality to congestion management and mobile wallets to NFC (Near Field Communication), they discuss the interesting days ahead for mobile network operators across the world.
Telecom companies need to move from being merely infrastructure companies to having add-on services on top of their infrastructure to survive. Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy at BT, looks at the container industry's history for insights into where the future for telecommunications will be. The money in the container industry was not in the infrastructure but in the service of moving objects from A to B, efficiently and profitably.
