The industry heads to Barcelona for the second holding of 3GSM in the city, and what do we expect to see that is different from last year? Well, last year we saw prototype handsets running early versions of mobile TV services over DVB-H and MediaFLO. This year with many trials and a small number of commercial mobile broadcast TV services around the world, expect to have seen things moved on from, “we’ve got the best technology”, to “we’ve got the best content partners and management platforms for you to manage and monetise services”. Oh, and the handsets will look better too.
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Last year we saw the GSMA launch its personal instant messaging initiative, in which operators pledged to work to interconnect all their own internal messaging communities. At the time, the question was, what about the existing IM communities out there already on AOL, MSN and Yahoo? So this year, mobile IM will be just as hot, and expect to see the GSMA announce progress on interconnection, especially in India. But there will also be a lot of discussion about the best way to interconnect the PC based IM communities to mobile users, and to each other.
Last year was really the year of HSDPA, as the industry welcomed the significant user experience benefits of the faster radio technology. Networks were going live and data card services were being made ready. This year there will be many HSDPA handsets, building on the few that were launched over the Christmas period. And the network discussions will have moved on with a vengeance to HSUPA in the near term, and Long Term Evolution in the, er, long term. But more than that, the increased capability on the uplink will open up a range of services. Expect to see much (even) more than you have done in the past around user generated content, citizen journalism, social media – anything that combines the enhanced network capacity with the web based 2.0 services.
So really what we’re talking about here, in all these examples, is the industry beginning to take on the concepts that get those that think about these things very excited – time and place (or geo) shifting. To me, that really means doing things at a time and a place that suits you, instead of being stuck on a sofa, in front of a computer, in the office, at night, in the morning, in the afternoon etc.
The challenge of such services is that they require the devices themselves to present, offer and combine services in a different way. And if you see someone who’s genuinely thinking about that and coming up with something new, then let us know…
KEITH DYER