MobHappy

I asked plenty of people the usual event questions this week at CTIA: “Seen anything cool?” “What’s exciting at the show?” and the like. The usual reaction? A bit of a shrug and an “Uhhhh…” Other people seemed to have similar thoughts as well. In years past, CTIA’s been a massive show with all sorts [...]

I spent some time at CTIA yesterday with Jon Lech Johansen and Monique Farantzos of DoubleTwist, a company which makes a media-sharing app and service. You might know Johansen better as DVD Jon, made famous by his cracking the content-scrambling system used as copy protection on DVDs. Since then, he’s cracked a number of other [...]

AT&T held a media event earlier, the star of which was undoubtedly the Microsoft Surface unit it showed off. AT&T is initially rolling the devices out in four cities, but hopes to expand them across its retail channel. AT&T’s implementation of this is pretty damn cool: shoppers can set a device on the Surface’s, uh, [...]

It’s pretty obvious that mobile TV hasn’t been a great success yet, for any number of reasons. Content problems, cost and other business model issues, lack of handsets — they’ve all conspired to keep mobile TV down. But I’ve seen a few things here at CTIA that are making me wonder if the mobile TV [...]

Some general impressions from the first day of CTIA: – Does “open” really mean much here in the US beyond “a new set of rules devised by operators”? Hard to really tell at this point. – This is like Barcelona with an American accent and on a smaller scale (with a lot of repeats from [...]

What, me late? Lost and couldn’t find the room? Never. Anyway, the upside is that I missed CTIA head honcho Steve Largent’s standarized bitching about taxes and regulation. Downside: I wasn’t so late as to miss Verizon Wireless boss Lowell McAdam bitching about taxes and regulation. To hear these guys tell it, the only issue [...]

Following the success of their event in Barcelona, the organizers of the Mobile Jam Session are putting on another one next Monday at CTIA in Las Vegas. Rudy de Waele tells me they have a few spots left, so if you’ll be around, sign up and check it out, as it promises to be a [...]

At CTIA last week, I met with a company called SNAPin, which makes a particularly interesting kind of customer-service software. Russell met with them at 3GSM, and like him, I came away pretty impressed. SNAPin software, once installed on compatible handsets (S60 and Windows Mobile at the moment), delivers context-relevant messages and content to users [...]