February 19th, 2009

The message from GSMA Barcelona: fragmentation

Posted by John Carroll @ 3:35 pm

Categories: Mobile, Personal Technology, Telephony

Tags: Phone, Mobile, Palm Inc., Smart Phone, Conference, Telecom & Utilities, Smart Phones, Advertising & Promotion, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology

The GSMA Mobile World Congress, which took place this week in Barcelona, is the world’s largest telecommunications trade conference. It is rumored that 50,000 attendees descended on this Catalonian city for the event, though that is matched by whispers at hotels and restaurants that attendance figures are considerably lower than past events. I filled out a GSMA survey today which asked, among other things, whether my company was placing limits on trade conference attendance budgets, which to my mind hints that market difficulties are affecting telecommunications companies as much as the rest of the economy.

Even so, it is, quite simply, the largest trade fair I have ever attended. Spread across eight separate exhibition halls, it featured booths promoting companies that covered every possible niche in the telecom tapestry. Attractive models in revealing clothing swam among a sea of mostly men in dark colored suits, which is the oddest thing about the GSMA conference. I have been to a number of trade conferences during my career, and participants are usually attired in stereotypical T-shirts and backpacks. According to a public relations person to whom I spoke, formality is typical of telecommunications conferences, which made this jeans-wearing California guy feel somewhat out of place (next year, I’ll pack my suit collection as carry-on).

Apple was a no-show at this year’s conference, but the long shadow of their technical innovations and market success was well apparent. Every hardware vendor in the mobile device space is making a touch-sensitive mobile phone these days, and the screen layouts of many bear a striking resemblence to the now-iconic iPhone entry screen. Large screens are becoming increasingly the norm, which is good news for those companies hoping to convince mobile users to consume more video media while on-the-go. MOFILM, a mobile short film festival that got massive coverage at the conference on account of attracting famous people to provide keynotes and hand out awards (well, “a” famous person, a.k.a. Kevin Spacey), would certainly benefit if large screens became more the norm. I can’t see mobile media becoming much more than a niche product if screen sizes stay small…unless vendors start including projectors into phones (not impossible, as Texas Instruments displayed some rather nice mini-projectors in their booth), or else provide wires that allow users to plug their phone directly into a TV set (some of the mobile video chips on display can now handle 1080p).

Granted, there are Read the rest of this entry »

September 24th, 2008

Thoughts on Microsoft Response Point

Posted by John Carroll @ 12:17 pm

Categories: Telephony

Tags: Software, SIP, Phone, Telephony, Product, Microsoft Corp., Response Point, Microsoft Response Point, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Telecom & Utilities

I’m not usually someone who reviews individual software products. There are stacks of people in the blogosphere who will take products for a spin, kick the tires, and write long posts about their experiences. Okay, I may do a bit of that. My installation of Media Center as my primary viewing system for TV caused me to have lots of experience with Media Center, which served as grist for many blog posts.

In this case, though, Microsoft’s Response Point - the product I learned about at last week’s ITEXPO - was particularly interesting to me as it didn’t fit well into some of the theories I have about the directions Microsoft should take from a business and strategic standpoint.

Most former Microsoft employees, in my experience, have strong opinions about the strategic directions they think their former employer should take, and I am no exception. In my case, I tend to fixate on Microsoft’s historical role as maker of software platforms. I think that every piece of software Microsoft makes should be designed as a set of reusable widgets that easily plugs into the wider Microsoft ecosystem.

Granted, not every product in the Microsoft lineup lends itself easily to high levels of programmability.  Even so, a good model is the one Microsoft used with the Office suite of products. Every application in the Office family can be reused and automated in third party software. This served as a strong competitive advantage for the company, and the fact that Microsoft tends to do this with most of its products makes the Microsoft “ecosystem” approach a winning strategy.

Microsoft’s Response Point, however, doesn’t fit into that model at all…at least not yet.

Microsoft Response Point is a Read the rest of this entry »

September 22nd, 2008

SIP is the future of telecommunications

Posted by John Carroll @ 8:40 am

Categories: Telephony

Tags: SIP, Telephony, Protocol, Telecommunications, Conference, SS7, T1 Connection, Session Initiation Protocol Trunk Connection, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Emerging Technologies

The 18th Internet Telephony Conference & Expo (ITEXPO) came to Los Angeles last week, and being the opportunistic sort, I decided to get myself on the press list. That’s one of the advantages of writing for ZDNet. Conference organizers will often let you attend their creation for free in hopes that you might write something about the products on display therein.

I’m not, however, one of those writers who likes to post a play-by-play of the happenings at this or that conference. I prefer to attend the entire conference, visiting all the classes and study groups which, to my mind, serve as the highlight of such things, only to figure out afterwards what new thing I have learned from the whole process.

I did note that this was the 18th ITEXPO…which means that there were companies thinking about a future where communication was entirely mediated by Internet-related protocols as far back as 1990. In 1990, the notion that a web of connections mostly linking academic institutions might serve as the foundation underpinning something as critical as voice communications must have seemed, to some, like so much technophile hyperventilation. Clearly, however, the Internet has been more than a little bit succesful. Furthermore, protocols designed to run over Internet connections seem to be reaching a tipping point with respect to their adoption by telecommunications companies. I’m not just saying that because I am still responding to the “reality distortion field” caused by the strange chemicals conference organizers insert into their continental breakfasts. Looking back, most of my career seems to have been spent working for one telecommunications company or another (though video-related work seems to have occupied most of the rest).

One thing that

Read the rest of this entry »