July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Old-school wireless trade association CTIA has absorbed MobileCon, a show for IT and enterprise mobile technologies, into its annual CTIA show, which itself is the one of the motherlodes of mobile conferences.

Previously, CTIA’s main event was held in the spring (usually March, but lately May), with MobileCon gathering IT folks later in the fall. The first so-called CTIA “super show” will be held in Las Vegas in September 2014; with this timing, organizers hope to avoid being overshadowed by either CES (held in January in Las Vegas) or Mobile World Congress (held in Februrary in Barcelona).

“The wireless industry is evolving rapidly, and there is a need to have a show that centers on the entire global mobile ecosystem in a way that hasn’t existed among the current shows, which is why CTIA 2014 will be unique,” said CTIA exec and show director Rob Mesirow in a statement on the news.

“In addition, the timing of the 2014 show will deliver the perfect stage for companies to debut mobile consumer products and services for the annual holiday buying season.”

Reps from Sprint and Ericsson chimed in, saying that the timing and scope of the new super show would be better for company and product announcements, as well.

CTIA and MobileCon will continue to run separately this year, with MobileCon 2013 taking place Oct. 9-11 in San Jose and CTIA 2013 taking place May 21-23 at the Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — BlackBerry 10 is late. Late for its originally scheduled release date, and even later to a mobile revolution that some say has already been won by Google and Apple. But the word “late” doesn’t seem to be in RIM’s lexicon.

“I don’t think we’re coming late, per se,” Jeff Gadway, senior manager of brand and marketing communications at Research In Motion, told me today in an interview at CTIA MobileCON. “The smartphone category as a whole is really just in its infancy. There’s still a tremendous amount of smartphone growth both in the United States and around the world.”

“Growth” is an interesting word, especially when you consider that the inverse is happening to RIM’s mobile subscriber base. By comScore’s calculations, RIM lost 3.1 percent of its mobile U.S. subscriber share between May and August. The company, still number three in the platform race, now holds just 8.3 percent share of the smartphone subscriber market.

Perhaps, for RIM, things just have to get worse before they can get better. The company is the unenviable position of bringing to market a mobile operating system and platform that must resuscitate a dying brand and return profits. Everything rests on BlackBerry 10, the operating system and the six new devices promised for 2013.

So, what’s so special about BB10? This sure sounds like one big hustle, but Gadway said that BB10 is all about the flow.

“We’re hearing that there’s a lot of fatigue in terms of user experience in the market. The paradigm that people are used to today, going in and out of applications using the home button, applications operating in silos … I mean, this is five, six years old now. People are looking for a better way to be able to move through all the tasks, and all the things that they’re being met with over the course of the day. Today, what you have to do is go into multiple applications to complete a simple task,” he said.

BB10 is the answer to the headache, giving people a new mobile flow that allows them to move quickly through all of their tasks.

“What we’re trying to do is streamline [the multitasking] process, break down the silos that exist between a lot of those applications … and introduce a new flow to the whole user experience paradigm,” Gadway added. “That’s something we’re confident is going to set us apart.”

Swipe down from the inbox to see what’s coming next or toggle between accounts within the BlackBerry Hub. These are the time-saving (world-changing?) mobile features that Gadway speaks of.

“It’s all about trying to put information that you’re going to need at your fingertips so you don’t have to go looking for it,” he said.

Sounds lovely and all, but successfully marketing that message to customers who’ve long moved on to Android or iPhone devices seems like stretch. That’s why RIM is starting early on the messaging front, Gadway told me.

Gadway also pointed me to some of BlackBerry 10′s finer details, as seen in the video below. The photo experience, for instance, includes a rather nifty time-shifting element for adjusting the shot and changing the final product.

Say you snap a photo of a friend and her eyes are closed. With time-shift enabled, you can scroll through different frames of her face, all captured while you were shooting the original photo, to pick the frame that portrays your bestie’s face in the best light. Best of all, the feature works for each person in the shot.

“I can create a moment that never existed,” Gadway said.

Little will these features matter if BlackBerry 10 doesn’t land the most desired applications. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are guaranteed, but others such as Instagram are not.

Gadway did say, however, that of the developers who RIM has seeded with prototypes, 99 percent have indicated that they’ve started work building for BlackBerry 10. The company handed out 6,000 developer prototypes before opening App World to developers today. So, that’s something.

But, for now, all we’ve got to go on is a whole lot of hustle and just the promise of flow.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — BlackBerry 10, the hyped mobile operating system that could resurrect the Research in Motion brand, is still months away from reaching consumers. Thousands of developers, however, were given early access to the platform to build BlackBerry 10-ready applications.

Wednesday, October 10 (10/10), BlackBerry opened App World to developers for BlackBerry 10 app submissions, product marketing manager Jeff Gadway said onstage at CTIA’s MobileCON. Gadway added that the company handed out 6,000 developer prototypes prior to today’s announcement.

The reveal is an important one. RIM is bleeding developers to Android and iOS, and any comeback story will be hinged on the company’s ability to attract the best developers to its platform. Native versions of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, as previously announced, simply aren’t going to cut it.

Robin Bienfait, CIO, Research In Motion

Wednesday, Gadway and RIM CIO Robin Bienfait also pitched the BlackBerry 10 platform to enterprise and IT professionals looking for a bring-your-own-device ready platform.

Gadway demoed how a consumer could use BlackBerry 10 to run App World for personal and business needs simultaneously. BlackBerry 10 is a seamless, easy, and fast solution for end users to be more productive, he said. “It’s fast and easy to deploy as a BYOD,” he added.

With an uncertain release date still months away, it remains to be seen whether RIM’s efforts around making BlackBerry 10 both consumer- and enterprise-friendly are enough to recapture the market share it has lost in recent years. By comScore’s account, RIM holds just 8.3 percent of the U.S. smartphone subscriber market. Google and Apple have 52.6 percent and 34.3 shares respectively.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Next week, Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE service takes the unprecedented step of landing in its 400th market, showing the company’s dominance in next-generation wireless service.

By comparison, Verizon’s closest competitor, AT&T, has 4G LTE service in just 75 markets. And don’t even get us started on Sprint, which is floundering to get LTE in a handful of markets this year.

Verizon’s 400-plus milestone achievement, announced Tuesday at MobileCON by Verizon Wireless chief technical officer Nicola Palmer, comes two months ahead of schedule. The winning city is Marquette, Mich., which was specifically chosen to symbolize Verizon’s commitment to extending 4G LTE coverage beyond the obvious big markets.

Verizon first launched its 4G LTE network in December 2010, offering consumers speeds nearly 10 times faster than 3G service. Since then, the company has been focused on expanding the network coast to coast, and it has ramped up the number of 4G LTE-ready devices for sale. The company has introduced 37 4G LTE devices, Palmer said.

Beyond Marquette, 4G LTE coverage will arrive in 20 additional middle-sized towns next Thursday. On October 18, the carrier will offer the faster service in 417 total U.S. markers, which gives it reach to an estimated 245 million people, the company said. Verizon will also roll out the speedier network to 30 more cities in November and December.

The pending network updates are part of a bigger push to persuade consumers to think of Verizon as the fastest network out there.

The speed message, particularly as to why consumers should care about 4G LTE, is harder to convey to people than the general coverage message, a company spokesperson told me yesterday. A variety of “Can You Hear Me Now?” ads were effectively used to drive home the idea that Verizon’s network is more reliable than competitors. The company aims to convey its 4G LTE prowess with equally simple, we’re-better-than-the-other-guys messaging.

It’s easy for consumers to understand “more than,” the spokesperson said.

Photo credit: shane_curcuru/Flickr

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Car sharing network Zipcar is putting a lot of functionality into its mobile app, after so many of its users — a generation of people 35 and under who prefer 4G to V8 — showed they prefer to interact with the company from their smartphones, company chairman and CEO Scott Griffith said Tuesday at the MobileCON conference.

Zipcar is the Cambridge, Mass.-based company that manages a fleet of more than 10,000 for-rent vehicles spread across 19 metropolitan markets and now 300 college campuses. The 12-year-old car sharing network has more than 730,000 members and expects 1 million customers around the start of 2013. The company booked 4 million total reservations in 2011.

Griffith focused his talk, directed at enterprise and IT types tasked with thinking about how to mobilize workforces, around the “mobility society,” or a society made up of Millennials whose lives are centered around the devices they tote around in their pockets, and whose decisions are forcing new business models.

Source: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

Cars becoming IP addresses

Millennials, said Griffith, no longer define freedom in terms of car ownership, choosing unfettered access to the information highway over buying a vehicle to navigate actual ones. To meet the needs of this group of 79 million always-on Americans, Zipcar has been forced to rethink the reservation system and in-car experience with mobile in mind.

“We used to think in terms of the browser,” Griffith said. “Now we think in terms of mobile devices, mobile operating systems.”

Nearly all of Zipcar’s customers, or 94 percent as of 2011, are smartphone owners. By mid 2011, the company crossed a telling threshold: 50 percent of all Zipcar activity was happening on mobile devices.

Today, Zipcar’s mobile application allows consumers to find, reserve, unlock, and end car reservations. In the near feature, the application will allow would-be customers to join the service through mobile by uploading a driver’s license photo and getting approved within minutes, Griffith said.

Also on the immediate agenda is a digital copilot, embedded in the Zipcar application, that will allow drivers to check the fuel level or battery life before booking a car and read up on how to operate the car they’ve selected once inside the vehicle. The company is putting a cell phone holder in every car so that customers can dock phones and interact with the app as needed.

Source: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

Zipcar’s mobile growth

Zipcar is working on a method for sending text messages to valet drivers so that customers can notify valets before they’re ready to take off. The company is also interested in directing nearby merchant offers to drivers and offering more personalization features — all powered by mobile, of course.

Griffith preached the message of reaching Millennials through mobile (and college campuses) like a pastor versed in the scriptures, but he failed to address that Zipcar, mobile-friendly as it may be, is at risk of being uprooted by nimbler, even more mobile car sharing companies such as Getaround and Car2Go.

In fact, the company’s stock price has been struggling of late, in part because Zipcar lowered its fiscal year 2012 guidance and also because the incumbent faces a wealth of competition from upstarts.

“Our story is linked directly to the growth of mobile networks,” Griffith said.

Perhaps, then, Zipcar should press the gas pedal even harder on its mobile initiatives.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile marketing and messaging leader Urban Airship has served more than 20 billion push notifications through iOS, Android, and other platforms, the company revealed today.

Urban Airship currently is helping more than 65,000 companies — including ESPN, Groupon, and other big names — with app notifications, a challenging but ultimately rewarding aspect to apps. You don’t want to annoy your customers with constant pop-ups, but there’s an incredible opportunity to having your brand appear on people’s home screens often. For instance, adding notifications from Urban Airship helped data-compression utility Onavo increase awareness by 75 percent and boost customer satisfaction 50 percent.

Now the company has enabled 20 billion push notifications, a new milestone that it reached on Sunday. That’s according to chief marketing officer Brent Hieggelke, who I met with today at the CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans. Hieggelke said the milestone was a surprise because the company took two and a half years to reach 10 billion notifications, a milestone it hit in January. Then, just four months later, Urban Airship doubled that number.

“Every month we set new records for growth,” Hieggelke told me. “But we were all surprised by the shape of that curve.”

The company has been spotlighted by both the tech press and the mobile industry for enabling a powerful new level of marketing. Just today, the company won first place at CTIA’s Emerging Technology Awards in the Mobile Marketing & Advertising category.

Next up on the company’s agenda is sign more customers and educate marketers with its “Good Push” campaign. “We want to explain to people how to maximize the value of notifications,” Hieggelke said.

Portland, Ore.-based Urban Airship has raised $21.6 million to date, with backers including Salesforce, Verizon Wireless, Foundry Group, and True Ventures. Its last round in November totaled $15.1 million.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Airship photo: ER_09/Shutterstock
Arrow image: Umberto Shtanzman/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Despite the hype, it turns out Samsung’s Galaxy S III doesn’t quite dazzle as bright as a supernova.

Last night I finally got my hands on Samsung’s hyped Galaxy S III superphone at the CTIA Wireless conference. While the features like S Voice, eye-tracking, and TouchWiz tweaks stood out, all I could think of was how it compared to the HTC One X, the other Android superphone that’s turning heads these days.

From a short demo where a Samsung PR representative walked me through the phone’s features, and from playing around with the speedy device myself, I liked what I saw. The screen is beautiful, the performance sizzled, and Flipboard for Android was fun to play around with. I was a big fan of the Samsung Galaxy S II and now Samsung has taken that phone to a new level here.

Both the Galaxy S III and HTC One X are huge: The Galaxy has a 4.8-inch screen, while the One has a 4.7-inch screen. (If you have small hands, these phones aren’t your friend.) And both phones have blazing performance and great cameras that could please the most discerning perfectionists.

But if you look at the Galaxy S III and HTC One X side by side (see the slideshows below), it’s clear that HTC has won on the design front, with a curved polycarbonate body, while Samsung has opted for a somewhat cheap-feeling plastic body.

Samsung, however, wins when it comes to features. Both phones have Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), but the phones’ respective Android skins offer different experiences. Samsung’s latest TouchWiz tweaks with S Voice, S Beam, Direct Call, and additional multitasking features. HTC offers high-quality Beats Audio and crazy good ImageSense tech for its camera, but that’s not enough to compensate for the phone’s inferior Sense skin.

The One X is available on AT&T now and will soon arrive on Sprint branded as the Evo 4G LTE. Samsung’s Galaxy S III will start showing up in stores around the world on May 29, but it will not hit the United States until some time in June.

Check out our full slideshow below to see more of the Galaxy S III in white and dark blue cases:

Check out page two to see the slideshow of the HTC X gallery for comparison to the Galaxy S III.

Pages: 1 2

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sprint announced Wednesday that its awesome-looking HTC Evo 4G LTE will arrive on shelves on May 18 and retail for $200 with a two-year contract.

The Evo 4G LTE is the successor to the incredibly popular Evo 4G, which was one of Sprint’s best-selling phones ever. The 4G LTE model ups the ante on its predecessor by running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and featuring a 4.7-inch LCD display, a 1.5-GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM, and an 8-megapixel camera with HTC’s powerful ImageSense technology.

Sprint timed the announcement to the ongoing CTIA wireless conference in New Orleans this week. On Tuesday, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse talked on stage with other wireless CEOs and emphasized the growing need for security and trust in the mobile industry. Perhaps he zeroed in on security because he couldn’t tout Sprint’s LTE network, which is non-existent at this point. Its flagship Evo 4G LTE won’t be able to take advantage of super-fast 4G speeds until later this year.

The company, which is the no. 3 wireless carrier in the U.S. after AT&T and Verizon, made the decision to switch from WiMAX to LTE as its primary 4G network, but it’s way behind its competitors. Sprint plans to have LTE in at least six U.S. cities by the middle of the year to cover 100 million Americans.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs is optimistic about the future of the mobile web, but as it stands now, he simply isn’t satisfied with the mobile web’s accessibility and openness.

“We’re standing in the middle of a tremendous platform shift,” Kovacs said today in a keynote at the CTIA Wireless conference. “[But] I look around our industry and I see a lot of walls going up again. The reason we could plug in our computers and access the Internet in the first place was because we could agree on standards.”

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox web browser, has a reason to be agitated at the state of mobile web. With Google and Apple increasingly controlling how the web works on mobile devices, a player like Firefox could get boxed out.

“The essence of it is that we are individuals and we want choice,” Kovacs said. “It’s impossible for me to believe that one or two companies will be able to curate content and foster development for 5 or 6 billion people around the world. It doesn’t add up.”

Kovacs said 7.2 percent of the world is now using mobile browsers, but by 2017, more than half the world will be using mobile browsers. That means Firefox needs a strong presence on mobile on top of its fairly strong hold on PCs and Macs.

He said he hopes HTML5 continues to grow and that, with 3 million HTML developers today, the web experience will continue to evolve and native platform development will fall off.

“Someone in this room will re-imagine the way we experience the mobile web,” Kovacs said. “We have to do better. HTML5 has taken off. It’s only a year old. A lot has happened in a year and a lot continues to happen.”

The way forward for mobile, Kovacs said, will be openness, standards, and a common language.

“Imagine if we all spoke a common language,” Kovacs said. “Image the explosion of innovation that would happen. I can’t predict the future, but I do know that the future is sooner and scarier than any of us can expect. … I’m pretty sure there will be one thing we can rely on: the web.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When the CEOs of AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and T-Mobile sit together on the same panel, sparks fly.

Just as they did a year ago, these prominent CEOs sat down today at the CTIA Wireless conference to talk about the mobile industry. Bombastic CNBC host Jim Cramer led the keynote session, which featured Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility; Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint Nextel; Dan Mead, CEO of Verizon Wireless; and Philipp Humm, CEO of T-Mobile.

Before the session began, each CEO gave a speech outlining his company’s priorities and expectations of consumers. What was fascinating about seeing them all lined up in a row was seeing how their styles contrast.

• Verizon’s Mead came out first and talked at length about the coming “spectrum crunch,” emphasizing that there isn’t enough wireless spectrum available now to satiate the demand that consumers have (and will have in the coming years). Without solving the spectrum crunch, Mead warned, the American economy could be hurt, as the mobile industry fuels much job growth and innovation.
• Sprint’s Hesse walked out second and focused his talk on trust and security. He said that consumers are confused about the terms “LTE” and “4G” and that “the number four has been misused.” Then he pivoted to say that security on smart devices would emerge in the next year as a much bigger priority, something Sprint is committed to solving.
• T-Mobile’s Humm spoke third and focused his speech on T-Mobile’s recovery. He admitted that T-Mobile’s period as an acquisition target for AT&T damaged the company’s reputation and lost it customers. But now that the company is out of the deal, it can now regain customers’ trust. The vision he wants to project is that T-Mobile is highly affordable yet still on the cutting edge of tech. He finished the talk by showing a new ad that claims T-Mobile can offer a much better experience than what can be had with an iPhone 4S on AT&T.
• AT&T’s de la Vega spoke last and used much of his time to pump up the company’s small-but-potent 4G LTE network and Digital Life, AT&T’s just-announced home automation and security system. On the LTE front, de la Vega cited a PC World study of LTE networks that showed AT&T as the winner. As for Digital Life, which won’t really take off until at least late this year, de la Vega seemed enthusiastic that it could wildly add to what consumers demand from service providers of in-home technology.

After the four CEOS got their time to shine, things really got interesting when they had to sit next to each other and answer questions from the entertaining and sometimes erratic Cramer, who hosts Mad Money on CNBC.

Cramer and the CEOs mostly acted civilly throughout, with each of the CEOs tying his answers to his presentation. Hesse referred to security and trust, de la Vega to LTE and home solutions, Mead to spectrum, and Humm to T-Mobile’s bright future.

One of the most interesting moments of the conversation was when Cramer brought up the new advertisement T-Mobile showed off. In the ad, a T-Mobile motorcyclist quickly outruns an AT&T motorcyclist, signifying the relative speeds of their mobile networks. AT&T’s de la Vega said the ad was simply not true and that its LTE network was quite fast. Humm shot back, saying the ad is iPhone-specific, and correctly pointed out that the iPhone can only take advantage of HSPA 14 on AT&T. de la Vega finished the verbal sparring by saying it’s not fair to compare a single device’s performance on a network to the network as a whole.

In another interesting moment, Cramer suggested to Humm that T-Mobile should separate from parent company Deutsche Telekom and file for its own IPO. Humm smartly refused to say anything on the matter but admitted that CTIA would be the perfect audience for such an announcement.

As for a full video recap of the panel, we will post a link once one is available.

Roundtable photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Prominent mobile chip manufacturer Qualcomm showed off its Wi-Fi Display technology Tuesday, and it’s a serious step forward for connecting TVs and phones.

Essentially, the Wi-Fi Display mirrors everything you do on your phone on your TV. When you play a game, look at photos, or watch a movie on your phone, all of that shows up with almost no lag on a connected TV set. A phone with a Wi-Fi Display chipset inside connects with a receiver that hooks up via an HDMI port on your TV set.

Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi Display is a technology standard that is enabled by the company’s components. The company showed off the new tech at the CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans and representatives let me try it out to get a better feel. This was the first time the company has allowed folks to test a complete set up, and in the past, Qualcomm has never had a receiver on hand to simulate real performance. To test it, I played a few levels of Angry Birds simultaneously on an Android-based test phone and a Samsung smart TV.

Qualcomm representatives said the tech will find its way in several major manufacturers’ phones in the “second half of 2012.” We expect prominent Android phone makers like HTC to release models that support the new industry standard.

Watch a demo of the Wi-Fi Display below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Japanese phone-maker Kyocera has a long way to go before it can really penetrate the U.S. market in the smartphone realm, but its just-announced Rise smartphone — running Android 4.0 and sporting a pleasant physical keyboard — might help.

Kyocera introduced the new phone at the CTIA Wireless conference where we had a chance to test the device out and see what it has to offer. While the phone is not impressive in any one way, it’s a solid all-around package that will likely appeal to those on pre-paid carriers like Boost and MetroPCS.

The specs aren’t terribly impressive: the Kyocera Rise offers a 3.5-inch screen with 480-by-320 resolution, a 1-GHz processor, a 3.2-megapixel camera with LED flash, and a 1,500 mAh battery. Up close the screen looked terrible, with dull colors and a cheap-feeling plastic case. But on the plus side, the device is lightweight, the keyboard offers a nice typing experience, and its basic performance was fluid thanks to the Ice Cream Sandwich software.

The pre-paid market doesn’t get the sexy hyped phones like the Samsung Galaxy S III or HTC Droid Incredible 4G, but those who prefer more reasonable plans on the pre-paid carriers still want power and versatility out of their devices. That’s a completely fair expectation, and it is admirable Kyocera is tackling that. In the same category as the Rise is the Kyocera Hydro, a waterproof smartphone with Ice Cream Sandwich that was also announced at CTIA.

A Kyocera spokesperson told me on the floor of the convention that Kyocera doesn’t even register in the top 10 manufacturers by smartphone market share in the U.S. But its strategy of putting cheap Android phones on carriers like Cricket, MetroPCS, U.S. Cellular, and Boost Mobile seems a smart way to gain traction since the post-paid market is overcrowded with Android phones.

Pricing and availability for the Rise are both up in the air, but Kyocera said the device will arrive on pre-paid and post-paid carriers. We expect the device to be free with a 2-year contract or less than $200 upfront on a pre-paid carrier.

Check out our slideshow of the Rise:

Online radio service Pandora has surpassed 150 million registered users, the company announced today at the CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans.

Pandora CEO and President Joe Kennedy spoke today on the main stage at CTIA. While most of his talk covered standard tropes of mobile innovation and encouraging progress, he took the time to give an update on his company’s progress at attracting U.S. users. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that about 311 million people live in the U.S. (as of March 2012), so Pandora has signed up a pretty massive chunk of the U.S. even with some duplicate accounts.

Kennedy said the company’s mobile progress has especially been prominent, with more than 100 million of its registered users accessing Pandora through smartphones or tablets. In regard to the iPhone, he said Panodra is the second-most downloaded iPhone app of all time, thanks in part to being in the iOS App Store on Day 1. He also noted that Pandora’s adoption of car tech has been aggressive, with 48 models across 18 auto brands supporting a Pandora in-car app of some kind.

As of April 2012, Pandora listeners consumed 1.06 billion hours of radio, an increase of 87 percent from a year ago. The company had 51.9 million active listeners in April, so while it has 150 million registered users, many of those users don’t return on a regular basis.

The stock market responded favorably to the news, with investors pushing Pandora’s stock on the NYSE up more than 4 percent in mid-day trading.

Photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At the CTIA wireless conference this week, a lot of the tech advances we’re seeing are superficial and nonsensical. Not HzO, which showed off its incredible waterproofing tech to many folks tonight.

HzO provides a nanotech-engineered coating that protects phones and tablets from serious water damage, and it claims its solution is 100 times thicker than any similar water-resistant coating on the market. Its tech will soon be available for Apple and Samsung phones and tablets.

I decided to take one of its coated devices for a spin, a Samsung Android phone with its back cover removed. Watch the video above, and you’ll see me dunk the phone in water. I made sure to do it myself so there was no trickery involved. While tossing the phone in water, all I could think about was how many times I’ve heard someone say they dropped their phone in a sink, bath tub, or toilet. This could be one heck of a pre-emptive measure.

After dunking the phone without its back cover successfully with no apparent damage, I also thought about the market potential. Eventually, manufacturers like Apple and Samsung could team up with a company like HzO and make all of its phones waterproof or give consumers that option before shipping. Or, a step further, nanotech coating every major smart device could just become a standard feature we come to expect from our gadgets.

AT&T announced its new Digital Life home automation system this morning, and we got to see the system in action in a New Orleans home during this week’s CTIA Wireless show.

The solution will compete with Verizon’s Home Monitoring and Control system and Comcast’s Xfinity Home, but from our first look, it’s pretty cool and will likely stack up well. Hacking your house isn’t easy, but Digital Life has apps and cool tricks to set AT&T’s version of the home of the future apart.

Digital Life is centered around apps that control your appliances and security. These apps are built on iOS, Android, as well as HTML5 for other web-enabled devices. Using the apps, you can see real-time feeds from cameras, turn lights on and off, close the blinds, or even lock the door while you’re away. You can even call a 24-hour security monitoring company maintained by AT&T and sound loud alarms by just moving a single sensor. The sensor will also turn on all the lights in the house if triggered.

“This is a traditional security system on steroids,” an AT&T representative told us, taking a shot at ADT, Broadview, and other security companies.

The connections to appliances are created using individual “control modules” that attach to an electrical outlet. You then plug an appliance into the module to create a wireless connection. The control module itself is the least futuristic part of the system, and it looks like a dumb white box. (Check out the last slide in the slideshow below to see how un-cool it looks.)

AT&T will run trials of the new service in Dallas and Atlanta this summer, with a national roll out in 3G-enabled areas coming some time after that. As you enable more appliances for wireless control, the cost will go up, creating a fairly customizable solution. The company refused to talk exact pricing, but I expect the initial setup and the several modules to cost a pretty penny.

Check out the gallery below to see more pictures of AT&T Digital Life in action:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s often said the third time’s the charm. With Verizon’s just-announced HTC Droid Incredible 4G, the third incarnation of this Android smartphone, both Verizon and HTC hope they have a winner.

The device debuts just ahead of the CTIA Wireless convention in New Orleans, at a time when HTC is desperately struggling in the global smartphone market. Over the past few years, HTC’s usually slick Android phones have lost their luster compared to Samsung’s even slicker offerings. In the last quarter alone, HTC’s revenue dropped by 35 percent year-over-year, so the company needs to up its game to bring consumers back to its brand.

But even if it’s financials are terrible, at least HTC appears to be focusing on creating quality devices again. The HTC One S on T-Mobile and One X on AT&T are among the best Android devices on the market now.

HTC’s Droid Incredible 4G features all the things you’d expect from a next-gen Android smartphone and maybe a little extra. It will run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and feature a 4-inch “Super LCD” screen with 960 x 540 resolution and an 8-megapixel camera. The device will get an extra power boost from its 1.2-GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, which is far fast than previous dual-core chips.

A full list of specs for the new phone can be found below:

• Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
• 4-inch super LCD qHD display
• 8 megapixel rear-facing camera with autofocus, LED flash, BSI, f/2.2, and 28 mm lens
• Front-facing camera for video chatting with friends and family
• 1.2 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor
• Mobile Hotspot capable to share 4G LTE connection with up to 10 Wi-Fi-enabled devices
• 8GB of internal storage
• Support for up to 32 GB microSD card
• 1,700 mAh lithium-ion removable battery

As for pricing and availability, HTC and Verizon are mum. Verizon said the phone will be available in “the coming weeks.” Based on similar phones, we’d expect the device to retail between $200 and $300 with a two-year contract.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Whether intentional or not, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse may have started luring bitter T-Mobile subscribers to the Sprint network who share common ground with him when it comes to AT&T.

Neither camp thinks AT&T’s purchase of the T-Mobile network is a good idea, but only one of them (Hesse) can say they voiced that opinion directly to the face of AT&T President Ralph De La Vega.

When Hesse was asked what his thoughts were on the recent carrier acquisition while on stage — sitting between Vega and Verizon CEO Dan Mead, to top it off — for a CTIA Wireless 2011 CEO panel, he paused a bit and then fired off a response.

“My opinion doesn’t matter. I think the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) and DOJ (Dept. of Justice) with have the say on that,” adding that he doesn’t believe it’s healthy letting two companies control 80 percent of all consumer wireless communication. It’s arguable that as a former executive of AT&T in the `90′s and the current head of Sprint, Hesse’s opinion does matter.

Regardless, it got a reaction from those in attendance who weren’t expecting much commentary about AT&T’s big purchase since the news was barely two days old and all T-Mobile executives were canceled from all appearances at the CTIA show to presumably prevent just that.

“I do have concerns that it would stifle innovation and too much power would be in the hands of just two,” Hesse said, which is both an expected and justified reaction for the leader of a company playing the role of underdog in a fight with two giants.

Verizon’s Mead weighed in shortly thereafter claiming that there’s plenty of competition among carriers, which would be true if your idea of remaining competitive was based on adult CEOs playing checkers with five-year-olds who still get excited about punch. Otherwise, I think it’s safe to point out that it wouldn’t be in his company’s best interest to say anything less about competition in the marketplace.

The discussion about carrier competition ended shortly thereafter but the snark from Sprint did not. Hesse took another jab, this time at Verizon after moderator Jim Cramer posed the question of why the wireless networks go down.

“Aren’t you on Verizon?” Hesse said to Cramer as he nodded his head yes. Ironically, Verizon’s LTE network looks to be the most impressive at this point.

But perhaps it’s the entire company and not just the CEO that’s adjusting its attitude to fit new roll as the underdog carrier. In another CTIA panel, Sprint Senior Vice President of Network Bob Azzi made fun of AT&T’s marketing department for being in charge of upgrading their network.

“If three can become four, then four can become five,” he said. Without competition to point out things like this to the consumers, people will believe whatever they’re told or just have to deal with it due to no alternatives.

Even if Hesse’s words don’t resonate with all the unhappy T-Mobile subscribers who want to switch carriers, Sprint is the choice most similar to the motivations that attracted them to T-Mobile in the first place.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Top mobile device company executives obviously overestimated their ability to positively spin responses to hard-hitting questions from Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg, who moderated a panel discussion about new mobile device trends at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference today in Orlando.

Far from the light, casual conversation expected from an industry driven event, Mossberg took full advantage of having business leaders from five of the largest mobile device maker on stage at the same time. The discussion covered tablets replacing laptops and desktops in enterprise and how design plays a role in mobile device success as well as long-standing trends in the industry that show no sign of changing in the future.

“Can we ever get to the point where we get rid of the carrier subsidies…?” Mossberg asked, remarking that a subsidy-free smart phone would eliminate carrier contracts, early termination fees and the like.

Mossberg didn’t buy the response from Research In Motion SVP of Business and Platform Marketing Jeff McDowell who laid blame on the carriers, which use subsidies as a valuable marketing tactic (something that isn’t likely to go away). Conveniently, McDowell omitted key details about his company’s relationship with those wireless carriers, who are estimated to pay almost two-thirds of the total cost depending on the device model.

“Our main channel of market for the smart phones is the carriers. That’s a strategic decision that was made many years ago. For us to change that decision would be tough to do overnight,” to which Mossberg replied “All right, I’ll give you two, three nights.”

McDowell got hammered yet again over RIM’s Playbook tablet — or more specifically the device’s Bridge technology that allows data syncing between Blackberry smart phones and created specifically for their most dedicated customers.

“So when I write my column, I can tell my audience not to bother if they aren’t huge blackberry users?” Mossberg said, later acknowledging that the Playbook offered a full experience and that the Bridge technology was simply complimentary to those owning a Blackberry.

Samsung Chief Product & Technology Officer Omar Khan also got drilled. He seemed well aware of Mossberg actively dismantling any spin, but continued touting the company’s new Galaxy 10.1-inch and 8.9-inch tablets as comparable to Motorola’s Atrix smartphone/netbook combo when paired with keyboard accessories.

“Lots of devices have keyboard docks, this is something different,” Mossberg said, which Khan agreed with and added that any innovation is good for the entire industry.

The huge potential for growth from Galaxy-branded accessories Khan spoke of was met with a question from Mossberg about whether it opens them up to the same kind of flack that Apple gets for being  closed off from third-party manufacturers unless they work directly with Samsung. Rather than address whether it was a concern, Khan began explaining how they invited Belkin on stage with them during an event in Barcelona to announce the Galaxy 2, but was quickly cut off.

“Steve Jobs brings people on stage, too. And they still get all that flack,” Mossberg said. “Everything you’ve said can be said about Apple, too.”

Mobile has never been hotter with the iPhone, Android,  the explosion in mobile advertising, and the rise of mobile apps, but, you’d never know it walking around the mobile conference called CTIA, held here in San Diego today.

The CTIA show that once was the key meeting place for the mobile industry seems less and less relevant with each passing year.  We wrote about this trend in early 2008, calling it “the end of the operator ecosystem,” the notion being that operators were losing their dominant gravity in mobile, and the “off-deck” or “open mobile” model was exploding as the next key wave in mobile.   

What does this “open mobile” thing mean?  Many of us who are mobile startup veterans often stood around at CTIA in years past, attending meeting after meeting to make sure we “got that Verizon deal” or “got that Vodafone deal.” These deals were transformative to our startup companies.  Companies of this ‘Soviet era of mobile,’ such as Phone.com or Infospace or Jamdat went public or were acquired for hundreds of millions on the strength of one or two key deals with operators.

This is no longer the case. The industry is opening up in a very healthy way – many innovative startup companies no longer need to work with the operators to get going.  Many startups are now using alternative “offdeck” modes of distribution such as buying mobile ads from Admob or using appstores such as Getjar.com or Handmark.com as ways to distribute, rather than “getting the ‘operator’ deal’.

This is goodness. It speeds up the pace of innovation for mobile startups and raises the tide for everyone in the ecosystem, the operators included.  Similar to AOL’s walled garden on the Internet circa 2001, the phone operator’s walled gardens have been cracking for a while now. But at this CTIA, traditionally an “operator show,” the lack of interest by participants punctuates the crashing of those walls.  The industry owes a thank you to Steve Jobs for the iPhone and now the Android team for really kicking those walls over.

So, some things that were interesting to me around the show that have helped drive this next wave:

The Android party is starting for real — The old mobile MENS club (Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens), is being swept away for good, to be replaced by a new generation of smartphone innovators  (see The end of the mobile MENS club).  It’s hard to recall just a short 5-6 years ago, before the iPhone, and before Android, how much the industry was controlled by what Motorola and Nokia chose to put in their phones, and the rise of these “Open OS” players means that consumers and developers now have a much greater say.  Most of these Android announcements have been reported independently, but interesting to see them together and the only buzz on the show floor are people checking out these devices.

Let’s see, with T-Mobile already in the Android camp, and AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon announcing at this show the movement towards Android, that’s ALL the major carriers in the US moving to include Android. While its taken 6+ years, nice work Android team.  Watch for the announcements at MWC Barcelona in February next year for Europe.

Here are the links:

• ATT and Dell announced an Android device (interesting, as the leading iPhone operator of course)  http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/07/dell-building-an-android-phone-for-the-us-report/
• Sprint announced Android on the Samsung Moment;
• Verizon announces launch of a range of feature phones and PDAs based on Android;
• T-Mobile adds to its holiday lineup of Android phones;
• Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola’s handset group announced a complete shift to working on Android in his keynote speech, and as a blow to Microsoft, in a roundtable talk, Motorola executives have talked about skipping the WinMo 6.5 platform and waiting for WinMo 7 in a year. Interesting also to see Dell skip WinMo for Android as well;
• Even Kyocera announced a new Android phone at the event yesterday.

“Off Deck” ways to distribute – In addition to new handsets, a key reason why the mobile operators have largely given up on their “walled garden” approaches is the rise of alternative or ‘off-deck’ modes of distribution.  Mobile advertising player, Admob, publishes a report monthly on its metrics, and on Admob’s network alone, there were 10.5 billion ad requests in August as opportunities to advertise directly to mobile consumers without having to do an operator “deal.” When added to the impressions logged by the Nokia, Google, Jumptap and other ad networks, that’s a lot of impressions to reach consumers.

Similarly, Getjar announced over 50 million app downloads of mobile apps in August.  The Apple AppStore announced over 2 billion apps downloaded since its launch in July 2008.  Other innovators are now learning how to use Facebook, and Twitter as social media channel for app distribution.  Simply put, all of these “off deck” distribution vehicles allow startups to get moving without requiring a long sales cycle to negotiate an operator deal. So that’s why fewer and fewer developers are making the trek to CTIA to “pitch their companies to the operators.”  To be clear, I think the operators can still be a powerful accelerant, and companies such as NIM, or TeleNav have benefited greatly from their carrier deals. But, it can be a tough, high-friction way to get started.

Other announcements:

• Yahoo Mobile home page — David Ko, head of mobile at Yahoo (and a super sharp mobile exec who took over from Marco Borreis this year), announced the new Yahoo mobile home page. This new strategy plays well to Yahoo’s strengths. in my opinion.
• BestBuy launches mIQ -– This service will help manage mobile services. Will this really work at scale?
• FCC & Net Neutrality — Boring, but very important for this Open Mobile revolution. Net Neutrality and “openness,” while value in Chairman Genachowski’s speech yesterday, were two of the key 4 points on the FCC’s mobile agenda.  While it will take a while to make all of this reality, the public policy posture, makes it harder to erect new barriers to innovation
• The normal alphabet soup battles shaping up for next year around 4G — WIMAX, HSDPA, LTE laden conversations were rife, but most of that was pretty quiet this year….

I’m not covering the event comprehensively. I just picked out the things that were interesting from one person’s perspective.  Mobile has been a tough space for startups these past seven years, and perhaps some of us are overly optimistic, but I believe this wave of “open mobile” will create some major winners just as the Broadband internet revolution (and dot com crash) helped the rise of world beaters such as Google, YouTube, Facebook and others.

(Disclosure: Accel Partners, where Richard Wong is a partner, is an investor in mobile companies such as Admob, Getjar, MetroPCS, Mig33, and NextG Networks – among others)