McGuire’s Law

A brief post about a big event - eComm 2009.

The title for this post has three meanings:

• Where can I start when describing this event?
• Where can you start when trying to get up to speed on innovation in telecom?
• Where can entrepreneurs start building momentum?

Unfortunately, I missed the inaugural version of eComm last year, but I’m looking forward to participating in this year’s version.

Describing the event is hard because it’s so big. The event website describes the conference as “the world’s leading-edge telecom, Internet communications and mobile innovation event.” But that misses the enormity of it. I count 93 sessions over three days (that’s all in one track, I believe). The speakers include powerful industry players such as Nokia, Cisco, Symbian, Skype, British Telecom, Qualcomm, Google, T-Mobile, and yes, Sprint. Some of my favorite mobility bloggers will also be there: Alan Quayle, Andreas Constantinou, Brough Turner, Dean Bubley, Lee S Dryburgh, and Martin Geddes.

If you’re wanting to get started on where innovation is happening in telecom, consider some of these session titles: “Creating New Opportunities from Android Openness”, “Mobile Phone Internet Connectivity Reinvented”, “Taking a SIP of Java - Building Voice Mashups using SIP Servlets”, “Digital Democracy or Plutocracy: Open Technology and the Future of Wireless Communications”, “Cloud Telephony - Why you need more then an API”, “Communications Enabling Business Processes to Make and Save Money”, “Where’s the money in Voice 2.0?”, “Cookie Scale Computing: Human-Computer Interfaces as Piles of Smart Little Things”, “A White Box. A Vision of Our Evolving Mobile World.”, “Voice 2.0 Applications in a Mobile Environment”, and “Voice Applications: The Wheel Has Already Been Invented.”

And where else can entrepreneurs get such a supportive start? The schedule includes twelve “launch slots” described this way: “Launch Slots are for something NEW. It can be a new startup, a product or a service. What it must not be is something incremental.” Last year eComm provided early buzz for companies such as fonolo, Ribbit, and some business inside of Google called Android.

Now that I’m sure you’re convinced that you need to start planning your attendance at eComm, you’d better hop to it - early bird registration closes this Friday.

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 archived streaming videos of the two panels I was on last week are now posted at the Mobilize site.

You can watch them here:

Signals from the Near Future: The Mobile Guru Panel

The Carrier Panel: Strategies to Keep Mobile Data Growing

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Now playing: Billy Bragg - Greetings To The New Brunette (Demo)

In addition to the two articles that GigaOm published last week, I also provided a third article for GigaOm’s consideration as lead up to last week’s Mobilize event.  Here it is for your reading pleasure!

Openness is an active topic in the mobile industry. But what does “open” really mean? In a discussion with leading mobile developers, we asked what “open” meant to each of them. As you can guess, each answer was different. But my favorite was “Open means not having to ask permission.”

I’m not sure that definition fits very well with the word “open,” but it does well capture what is desired from openness. I believe the phrase “freedom” better reflects what we are all seeking as we transform the mobile industry.

Mobile customers desire the freedom to access any legal network-based content or application, anywhere and anytime. They want the freedom to make their mobile devices their own – personalized with their style, their content, and their applications. They want the freedom to install new software and new content, without restrictions, on their mobile devices. Mobile customers want the freedom to choose from a wide variety of devices and change from one device to another as the situation warrants.

But mobile freedom is not just the freedom “to” it is also the freedom “from.” Customers desire freedom from surprise bills, freedom from hard to use devices and services, freedom from the challenges of finding interesting content and applications, freedom from being bombarded with irrelevant ads, freedom from their personal information being shared with people they don’t trust, freedom from never-ending lock-in to one network.

Mobile developers also want freedom. Developers desire the freedom to innovate - leveraging the power of mobility to create new value for customers. They want freedom from having to develop for an infinite variety of devices and platforms. They want the freedom to implement the business model that fits their product and market. Mobile developers want the freedom to succeed.

If this is the freedom that is desired, is it the freedom that is being delivered by the mobile industry? If you care enough about this topic to have read this far, I doubt I need to answer that question.

So, why isn’t the industry hopping right to it and delivering mobile freedom? I believe there are two answers, one somewhat philosophical and the other quite practical.

I believe all industries suffer from a similar problem. Since I’ve “grown up” in telecom, I call it “ Big Bell Dogma.” In short, Big Bell Dogma is resistance to change. In large part it is driven by the market power held by incumbents and their fear that change will reduce that power. Each of us, individually, suffers from Big Bell Dogma. We resist change because it brings uncertainty over whether we can continue to be successful. But the greater the power held, the greater the resistance to change. A monopoly mindset is what gives Big Bell Dogma its name.

On a more practical level, the reality is that the mobile industry has an existing, profitable business model that generally delivers the kind of financial results Wall Street expects.

I believe that mobile freedom will drive significant market growth – just as freedom drove tremendous growth in the PC market (with the IBM/Microsoft/Intel standard platform) and in the Internet market (when the web delivered new freedom to end users and developers). I believe that mobile operators who embrace freedom can participate in that market growth and can actually deliver better financial performance (faster growth, better margins) than the current model.

The challenge is in the transition. In a freedom-enabled mobile market, the revenues change. The sources of revenue change and the nature of revenues change. In a freedom-driven business model, the costs change as well. Unfortunately, synchronizing the revenue and cost changes is challenging.

To successfully manage through this transition takes a long series of small steps, each with manageable risk. Sprint’s introduction of the Simply Everything price plan to deliver freedom from surprise bills was a manageable risk. Our introduction of the Titan platform to deliver freedom for developers from fragmented device development was a manageable risk. The list goes on.

Over time, a series of steps can get us to mobile freedom. But wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about a transition?

Sprint was blessed with that opportunity in the launch of our WiMax business – Xohm, soon to be part of the new Clearwire. The Xohm business model was built from the ground up to deliver mobile freedom to customers and to third party developers.

It has been very exciting to watch the birthing of a new industry model, and it will be fascinating to watch as mobile freedom grows and matures!

Last week while I was traveling, the GigaOm team posted my second article “Mobility - What’s Different.”

The article starts by asking “Is mobility a new revolution, or is it just an extension of the previous PC and Internet revolutions? Is anything really different?”  It then uses the Kindle, Dash Express, DriveCam, and CardioNet to help answer the question.

Check it out!

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Now playing: Matthew Perryman Jones - Beneath The Silver Moon

I’m scheduled to speak at Mobilize.  Originally the event was structured as a mix of talks and panels and Surj had picked for me a topic along the lines of the title of this post.  Recently, the event has been restructured to be almost entirely panels, so you can expect to see me in a couple of very interesting conversations on the 18th.

But… I’d started collecting my thoughts for what a talk on 2008 vs. 1998 might look like, and instead of throwing it all away, I thought I’d share some of those thoughts here…

If you go back and take a look at what was happening in 1998, you’ll find that there were some pretty interesting IPOs that year.  Of the class of 1998, eBay probably stands out as a prominent survivor, but other initial offerings that year include Broadcast.com, GeoCities, and Inktomi.  Not bad companies, but clearly from a different era than today - what we could probably categorize as “Web 1.0 companies.”

But, the really exciting thing that was happening in 1998 wasn’t inside the browser, it was inside the walls of our homes. 

In December 1997, Covad launched DSL in San Francisco.  By the end of 1998, they were also operating in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York.  Northpoint launched in the Bay area in March 1998.  By the end of the year, in addition to Covad’s 4 cities, they were also in Chicago, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.  Rhythms NetConnections got started a month after Northpoint in San Diego, but they moved fast, operating in 11 markets by year end.

The cable companies were already out there - @Home was operating in 59 markets by the end of 1998 with a whopping 331,000 subscribers.

Where were the telcos?  Still trying to convince everyone that ISDN was what they needed for broadband.  In fact, @Home’s 1998 annual report included this risk: “The regional Bell operating companies (’RBOCs’) and other local exchange carriers have also entered this field and are providing price competitive services. Many of these competitors are offering (or may soon offer) technologies that will compete with some or all of the Company’s high-speed data service offerings. Such technologies include Integrated Services Digital Network (’ISDN’) and Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (’ADSL’).”

Wow.  Doesn’t that sound like ancient history?

And yet, today it sounds like ancient history because @Home, Covad, Northpoint, and Rhythms Netconnections succeeded in revolutionizing the Internet by introducing always-on broadband connections with non-scary pricing and non-scary implementation.  (They may not have succeeded on other dimensions, but that’s another story.)

Could any of the following be possible today without easy-for-everyone always-on broadband?

• YouTube
• Google Maps
• Flickr
• Second Life
• World of Warcraft
• Facebook/MySpace/Orkut/Cyworld etc.
• Twitter
• the list could go on…

The point is that 1998 was a critical turning point for how we interact with our world through the Internet because of the investments being made in key enablers.

And, I believe that 2008 is the same type of critical turning point for how we interact with our world through mobile devices.

There are already some really cool mobile capabilities out there, but I think of them as the equivalent of narrowband applications:

• RIM Blackberry
• Telenav
• Xora
• Loopt
• Pocket Express
• SMS for that matter…

The applications that are possible are constrained by some combination of bandwidth, usability, coverage, pricing, or policies.  And the exciting thing is that, in 2008, these barriers are starting to come down.

Being very provincial for the moment, consider the revolutionary changes introduced just by my own employer, Sprint, in 2008:

• Simply Everything pricing
• The Instinct - intuitive user interface
• Airave - solving indoor coverage challenges
• Xohm + Clearwire - beginning to launch nationwide multi-megabit mobile broadband
• Titan java platform

As standalone events, these changes are up and down the “excitement scale”, but taken as a whole, they represent change as revolutionary as the broadband Internet revolution. Mobility promises to unleash innovation that leverages the unique personal, context-aware, always-with-you nature of mobility to create compelling value well beyond the Internet as we know it today. 

Where will these advances take us?  No one really knows, but I believe that, while today we see mobility as a poor (limited in bandwidth and form factor) extension of our desktop, in the not so distant future we will see our desktops as a poor (limited contextual relevance) extension of our mobile experience.

What do you see coming?

In my last post I mentioned my trip to New York. I hadn’t been to the city in awhile, so my ride in from the airport was my first encounter with the interactive systems built into New York’s cabs. I was very impressed, so I was pleasantly surprised that one of Sprint’s partners at the Technology Summit could explain to me all the technical details behind the deployment.

First, let me describe the user’s perspective.

When I climbed into the cab, I immediately noticed a touch screen built into the back of the front seat, so it was easily reachable from any position in the back seat. The screen had about a 9″ screen that was plenty big for the viewing distance in the cab. It had a credit card swipe built into it as a secure payment option.

The screen itself was generally split into three sections. (The picture at the right doesn’t perfectly match what I experienced.) The very top section was a collection of touch screen soft buttons for selecting content. The rest of the screen was split about 50/50, with the section on the right playing full motion video from a local news broadcast. After riding in the cab for about 20 minutes it became apparent that the content was repeating. At the very top of this video window was a banner ad that changed about every couple of minutes. These banner ads were interactive - clicking on them resulted in the advertiser’s content being brought up in the left pane. I didn’t follow any of these links far enough to see if they could result in transactions.

The left pane was for live interactive content. By default, this pane shows a map of the city, tracking the cab’s actual location. It would be really cool if the driver entered the destination and the passenger could track where they were relative to start and end points, but for now it just shows current location. Still cool. As mentioned above, clicking on a banner ad brings up the advertiser’s content in this pane. The previously mentioned content soft buttons also result in content being loaded into this left pane. Choices include weather, sports, business news, and Zagat’s content. I chose Sports to try it out and was presented with a list of headlines that I could click to read the news.

Given my normal white knuckle response to seeing my NYC driver weaving through traffic and construction, this device made my journey much more enjoyable!

Now let me tell the technology story behind the story.

At Sprint’s Technology Summit, I met the team from Walsh Wireless, a Sprint Business Solutions Partner (BSP) who has lots of experience with digital signage solutions integrating Sprint’s EV-DO network. They tell the complete story on their website, but here’s my shortened version.

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission selected several vendors to deploy the interactive systems to the city’s 13,000 taxi cabs. Creative Mobile Technologies won the business for 5,000 vehicles, but they were facing some challenges with the wireless network deployment, so they turned to Walsh Wireless for help.

Here’s what’s built into that seat back to make it all work. Walsh Wireless solved the wide area connectivity with a standard Sprint EV-DO data card, but with additional engineering using amplifiers and high gain antennas to ensure consistent connectivity while moving rapidly through the city’s urban canyons. This is then used to provide the interactive content features, the credit card processing, and even a WiFi hotspot inside the cab. This hotspot had to be specially engineered to limit the reach and avoid interference between adjacent cabs. The video content is distributed three times a day and stored locally on a hard drive in the cab.

Cool stuff!

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Now playing: Mark Heard - We Have Let Freedom Ring

This morning I participated in Sprint’s Technology Summit in New York. It was a great event. Thanks Phil and team for doing a great job and thanks to everyone for showing up on a rainy spring day.

In addition to speakers and vertical-specific break-out sessions, there also were a dozen or so companies describing and demonstrating their capabilities. One of those companies, NextMail, has a really cool PTx (push-to-x) offering that is now fully integrated into Sprint’s Nextel Direct Connect offering.

With NextMail, you set up Direct Connect numbers mapped to e-mail addresses. When you DC that number, it is translated into an e-mail message with the voice message stored as an audio file. The GPS location data can also be included in the message, and there are a variety of options for returning the message. The demo I saw included a DC number set up to collect traffic delay information so that a centralized contact can keep track of traffic information coming from many different NextMail users.

Great stuff!

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Now playing: Mark Heard - What Kind Of Friend

A week ago I participated in a panel at Wharton.? On Monday I told you about it.? Late this week Knowledge@Wharton published an article about the panel.? I have to admit that the journalist remembered better than I did what I said.

On Monday I told you that there are “three factors that inhibit the adoption of great new mobile applications today: 1) Fear of billing surprises (’If I click on this, will I be charged something extra?’) 2) Discoverability (’How do I find great new mobile applications anyway, and how do I install them on my phone?’) 3) User interface (’How do you build a great new mobile application with this tiny screen and challenged keyboard?’). ”

The Knowledge@Wharton article paraphrased me as listing the three factors as:

“The first is that cell phone users are afraid of running up a huge bill if they try a new feature.”

“The second issue is what McGuire called discoverability.”

“Third, he warned that when new technologies come along, the industry typically tries to use them in old ways rather than adapting them specifically for the mobile platform. ‘There are things that are inherently different about mobility,’ said McGuire. He held up his own wireless device and said, ‘This is me. It’s not my company. It’s not my home. It’s not my location. Those aspects of mobility are now just beginning to show up in applications.’”

He’s right.? I’m wrong.? That’s what I said (and of course I fully agree with it).

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Now playing: Phil Keaggy - Trailwalker