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.