McGuire’s Law

In order to be winners in the new mobile era, businesses will not only need to capture the power of mobility, but also manage the danger. Highlighted below are recent examples of the danger of mobility and how some firms are beginning to manage it:

• Driving while distracted
• Beeps
• Cellphone zombie armies
• Skin rash
• Lack of trust
• Mobile messaging addiction
• Mobile enterprise data in the cloud

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Now playing: Katie Herzig - Shovel

More and more, the world around us reflects the growing assumption of the law of mobility. Here are a few indicators of Mobility’s growing importance in our businesses, our lives, and our society:

• Consumers prefer mobile devices to PCs for Internet
• 25th anniversary of first commercial cellular call
• Mobile gaming is a $1B industry
• 200M iTunes TV downloads
• Hundreds of thousands of Android Market downloads in first 24 hours
• Kindle is Oprah’s “new favorite thing”
• Older adults adopting texting

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Now playing: Judd and Maggie - Kingdom of Noise

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• The Financial Crisis and the Mobile Device Industry
• Inside Motorola’s Android Phone
• “Telco adoption of Web 2.0 principles and open innovation for rapid application development”
• Application Marketplaces, Smartphones, and Enterprise Mobility
• Carriers Spend Billions on Networks and Millions to Dress Them Up
• communities and mobility
• Please sell to me on my mobile, if I’m nearby…
• For ATandT, iPhone Giveth Customers But Taketh Profits
• The last nail in the coffin for the idea of massmarket Mobile Centrex?
• Google announces Android App Market paid application details, revenue share model
• Femtocells: making the economics of convergence work
• Cell Phones With GPS Ring Up New Revenue For Carriers, Vendors
• Carrier Video Services: Trends and Opportunities
• So iPhone reached 11.6 million unit sales in past 12 months
• Google opens the floodgates, open-sources Android
• Where Will Android Go Next?
• Credit Crunch: Is there a silver lining for telcos? (Part 3)
• A year after the hype: Where is open access now?
• Open source in mobile phones: challenges for software vendors

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Now playing: Relient K - Nothing Without You

One more story from my trip to Boston this week…

On Wednesday morning I caught a taxi from my hotel.  As we were approaching the convention center, the cab driver asked “what convention are you attending?”

I told him it was Mobile Internet World.

“Are you guys launching WiMax?” he asked.

“Um, yeah, we are, actually.”

He responded “I’ve been reading up on WiMax.  It makes so much more sense to me.  Did you know they have it in Baltimore now?”

“Uh, yeah, we launched it a couple of weeks ago.”

“I can’t wait for WiMax to come to Boston.”

As we arrived at the convention center, I assured him that Boston was one of the handful of next cities to get WiMax.

Apparently, those of us in the mobile industry aren’t the only ones excited about 4G technologies!

As I mentioned earlier, I was in Boston this week for Mobile Internet World.

My keynote was titled “Mobile Freedom Now!” I started by acknowledging that Boston is a birthplace of revolution, and just as Bostonians demanded freedom centuries ago by dumping tea in the harbor, Americans are demanding a revolution in mobility.  The bulk of my talk was structured around the need for the industry to revolutionize mobility to make it more instant, more compelling, and worry-free.

Dan Meyer at RCR Wireless compared my talk with that of Anthony Lewis, Verizon’s VP of Open Development.   I’m pleased that Dan picked up both on the radical openness of Sprint’s WiMax efforts but also our incremental moves on our core 3G network: “While the carrier’s WiMAX network has received the most attention recently, McGuire also highlighted the openness Sprint Nextel provides for its CDMA network.”

Dan Butcher at Mobile Marketer provides an impressively comprehensive report on my complete talk.  Thanks to Dan, I don’t need to work very hard to try to explain what I had to say.   Dan summarized my talk with this quote: “Carriers [are] at the central point of either enabling this mobility revolution or holding it back.  There are fundamental changes that have to happen to fully unleash the power of mobility revolution.”

Meanwhile, Don Jose succinctly captured my core message: “Openness is esential[sic] for revolutionizing mobility.”

This week I was in Boston for Mobile Internet World.  Tuesday evening, I had the pleasure to sit between Rich Miner and Mark Lowenstein at a very enjoyable dinner hosted by Charles River Ventures (thanks Jon!).  Being right on the tail of the open sourcing of Android, and on the eve of the official launch of the first Android phone and the Android Market, Rich was obviously in the midst of a momentous week.

Rich recounted for me the long journey his Android vision has taken, starting when he was at Orange, when he envisioned a standard mobile platform across mobile operators to which developers could write.  At Orange, along with T-Mobile and Vodafone, he pushed the SavaJe platform as a potential solution, but that platform struggled to fight through the long path to realization.  After launching the startup company called Android, he and his co-founders considered venture funding, but realized that it would really take a company like Google, with deep enough pockets and enough patience to take the long view towards profitability, for the vision to become an impactful reality.

Congratulations Rich and team on these major milestones towards that reality!

(Here were my thoughts on the announcement of the Open Handset Alliance and Android just over a year ago.)

The most convenient way that mobility is getting built into products is through the convergence into the cellphone of capabilities that previously existed as standalone products. That way, those products are now with you and available for your use whenever you need them wherever you go.

• Cellphone as car key
• Cellphone as car key (take 2)
• Cellphone as Zune
• Cellphone as koi pond
• Cellphone as ad monitor
• Cellphone as cigarette lighter
• Cellphone as glass of milk
• Cellphone as hourglass

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Now playing: Relient K - For The Band

Standard disclaimer: don’t take from my selections, ordering, headlines, etc. any indications of the interests or plans of my employer (if you do, you’ll undoubtedly be disappointed when they don’t play out.)

• Mobile Startups & VC’s: Opportunities in Times of Crisis
• Great Mobile Marketing Apps
• Verizon to hike fees for mobile-terminated messages
• location services beyond maps, directions, and local search
• Who Will Own the Mobile Internet?
• How will wireless weather the economic storm?
• Is The Smartphone Your Next Computer?
• A Quick Slick Unpick of Blyk’s 2-Sided Business Model Trick
• Telcos’ 2-Minute Drill - Industry Standards for accelerating change
• Subscriber Data Management
• WiMAX vs. LTE vs Global Economy
• Why Windows Mobile Is In Trouble
• Economic downturn forces mobile ad spending cuts
• Mobile Web Usage Explodes Worldwide According to AdMob
• Economic Slowdown to Accelerate Next-Gen of Mobile Software

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Now playing: Todd Agnew - Reached Down

Bonus: The Times reports “Mobility is the new name of the game” for businesses

Mobility is a wonderful thing. As mobility gets built into all products and services, businesses need to learn how to both capture the power of mobility and manage the dangers introduced through mobility. Here are some examples of how the power of mobility is being applied to create competitive advantage:

• Carrier moving to 2nd generation of mobile worker apps
• Export Development Canada expecting 7-digit productivity boost from mobile deployment
• Vassar mobilizes to enhance learning in the field
• Malibu Beach Inn mobilizes guest service
• Kenyan elephants texting to keep out of trouble
• How BMW uses mobile marketing

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Now playing: Jeff Coffin & Charlie Peacock - Charthel Hill

The Law of Mobility talks about value increasing with mobility. The impact of this law is being felt because the barriers to building mobility in are being obliterated week after week. Here are examples of technology advances enabling this to happen:

• Millimeter wave technology
• Foldable screens
• Light bulb networks
• App acceleration
• WiMax-enabled laptops
• Fennec
• Beamforming and Vector Mesh Networking

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Now playing: Kate York - Stay With Me