CTIA 2008 recap

I’m just back from another CTIA, this year in Las Vegas. For those who are not in the wireless industry, CTIA is the largest wireless / mobile trade show in North America. There are actually two CTIA shows a year, one in March the other in October. The March show focuses on infrastructure, services, hardware and the like; the October show is primarily mobile content. ActionEngine attends both shows (most mobile companies do).

HEADING DOWN
I flew down Monday to help set the booth up and prep for the opening day of the show. Truth be told, I find Vegas to be something of a mixed bag. I’m not a gambler, I can’t say that I’m a big drinker/partier, and I get uncomfortable in crushing crowds of humanity. So, rather than any of that, I like to hunt out the absurd (turns out there’s an abundance of it there), stake my claim, sit back and watch the hilarity ensue. It’s great fun for a few hours at least.

It turns out that I wouldn’t have to travel that far, in fact it seemed like absurdity had come to me. Driving in from McCarron airport (after waiting in taxi line reminiscent of the old E-ticket rides at Disney) the taxi passed a casino that I have never seen before. Particularly, one named “Terrible’s” (I can only imagine if there was truth in advertising, I never actually went in.) The second bit actually came about when I stepped into the convention center to get to the show floor. I accidentally came into the wrong side of the show and found myself in — The International Pizza Expo. Who knew there would be an entire show dedicated to “The best sauces ever” and “Freezing to Save”? Well, now you do.

SHOW BOOTHS ARE THE NEW McMANSION
Despite the number of trade shows I attend, I am almost always amazed at the sheer size of some booths. Charitably I can say that some of them were merely monstrous in size, others are better described as temples to Mammon. The price tag of these installations can quite easily top 5 million dollars, which does not include the shipping, construction, hook-up and deconstruction charges. These are by no means minor affairs when it comes to the big boys.

In terms of booth design fad, this was the year of the JumboTron. ‘Trons where visible from nearly ever vantage point on the trade floor, some kicking out enough light to cast shadows from nearby foot traffic. (Interesting fact: CTIA now uses 25% “green” electricity. By “green” I think they really mean to say electricity to power green LEDs.) Ericsson, Nokia and a couple of hardware vendors all decked out their spaces with JumboTrons, all blasting out images of youthful (generally large breasted) women delighted to be doing something with their mobile. Interspersed are animated text sequences extolling virtues of the company usually in a self deprecating relate-to-us-as-real-people-too kinda way (”700 million messages a day? Big Deal. Go for 8 billion.”). Last I checked real people have yet to install video screens 30×30 feet in size to share their vacation pictures. If you know otherwise, please share.

Leading the pack with ‘Tron usage by far was LG who not only had two large screens on either side of their booth facing outward (one pointed squarely at a blank causeway wall), but they also installed five smaller screens (only 3×10) in the front of their booth. The booth was actually less of a booth and more of a dance club really. They had a D.J. booth with someone spinning disks from start to finish each day, an intricate light show from a ring of IntelliBeams handing from joists above — enough to make any metal or new wave band happy at any rate — and to top it off they had funky listening pods that faced a rotating statue: a statue of a silver angel delightedly holding a cellphone to her ear. Apparently, yes, the Host of Heaven can indeed hear you now.

WORKING THE BOOTH, THROWING THE AT&T FAST PITCH
More than half the fun of any trade show is working the booth and pressing the flesh with people who walk up. The people you meet usually fall into one of five categories:

people who want to sell you something,
people looking for your swag handout,
people convinced they are smarter than you and wish to prove that point,
the incoherent and baffling guy, and
the occasional prospect.

This show didn’t deviate from the model. All these people came by to wrangle.

I actually had more fun presenting for the AT&T Fast Pitch than working booth duty. Fast Pitch is an invitation-only program where application providers do a pitch to a panel of AT&T judges about picking up their application for distribution. Fast Pitches last a maximum of five minutes — they have a debate timer which angrily beeps when your time is up — and the vast majority of the pitch has to be a demo. AT&T assesses the applications based on (according to the invitation anyway) innovation and originality, market appeal, ease of use, device support, ease of integration with the AT&T network. I pitched two Action Engine applications: the Dow Jones news application and MySI Mobile. At stake was a first prize of $25,000 and promotion on MEdia Net’s “What’s Hot” spot for a week, and $5,000 for the second and third place runners-up.

The Dow Jones pitch took about six minutes from in the door to out the door. Dow Jones is a pretty neat application; it actually encompasses the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch properties. When we finished the demo the AT&T panel gave a blank look said they didn’t have any questions and shoo’d us out the door. Not the brightest of prospects.

The Sports Illustrated pitch by contrast was stellar. In addition to AE staffers the VP of Biz Dev for mobile at Time Warner came along to the meeting. After the dog-n-pony the AT&T panel lit up with questions: How are you going to keep the application fresh? (We’re planning regular updates to coincide with events like the swim suit issue.) Would you consider adding video or streaming audio? (Maybe, we’ve looked at it but waiting for the best possible user experience to come around in terms of technology. Not right now though.) How many devices are you planning to support? (BREW, Java and RIM for a total count of like 160 devices.) The mood changed swiftly with the last question: Would you consider doing a subscription-based model? (No. Customers consider news to be a free good and charging them for it kills the business model. We have to remain advertising supported.) It was as if the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped. Needlesstosay, we weren’t invited back for the final three.

Anne Baker (AE’s phenomenal VP of Marketing) and I were curious as to who the final three were so we stopped back at the Fast Pitch room to ask. (I’ve left the names of the companies out, I figure that sometime in the future I’ll need to get another job in the industry. That hasn’t stopped me from linking to relevant sites however.) The finalist list was actually a bit baffling to us, based on what we knew about the judging criteria. One of them was a human guided search engine which has received some interesting blog traffic as well as an un-fan MySpace page. They ended up winning the $25k. One of the other applications is a location-aware service for telling you what stores are having sales nearby. It’s a great idea in concept but the model has some serious holes, the least of which is getting merchants to actually populate the service with information. At last report the SBA estimated there were 22 million business in the US, if even 10% of those were retail outlets that means the service would need to scale immensely with an entire legion of account managers to support just the backend. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Finally the other winner was a company that made mobile flash card software. FLASH CARD SOFTWARE?!?!?! Ugggh.

WALKING THE SHOW FLOOR
I usually reserve walking the show floor for the very last day of the show. By that time, most of the fidgety sales people have left for the airport and the remaining folks are generally worn down to a nub. All this makes it easier to get plenty of free disclosure on topics that most companies would sooner not talk about with complete strangers. It’s always a good time.

I didn’t get as much time as I would ordinarily have liked to spend on the floor, so I had to make the most of my time by asking shotgun “emperor has no clothes” questions basically from the get-go rather than making it a punchline to a chat. Of note I remember six companies in particular (I’ve avoided using their names here as well, but follow the links if you’re really curious) that stood out. They ranged from incredible awesomeness down to the ridiculously stupid. As in “how did you get funded?”, jaw-droppingly stupid.

At the top of the pack was a French company that did mobile video compression. Their claim was they could push 24 frames a second (movie quality) video to a mobile device in such a way that the video was crisp enough to notice fine detail, but did not trade battery life for the quality. In general, video quality is the enemy of battery life since codec algorithms are PhD discrete waveform analysis complex. However, they delivered the goods. In their booth they had seven devices all running movies concurrently (”The Bourne Identity” and “Wild, Wild West” stood out) like a movie studio in miniature. A developer gave a a demo of their live television transcoding abilities, showing me a live stream of the BBC and then CNN. The image was crisp enough to read the ticker on the bottom of the screen. For a canvas of only 320 pixels by 240 pixels I thought it was nothing short of phenomenal. I chatted with their VP of Biz Dev, exchanged business cards and talked briefly about doing a licensing deal with their libraries. (Although oddly enough she didn’t know what a library was when I mentioned it.)

Another company was a mobile screen design consultancy based in Sweden, presenting inside the Texas Instruments booth. I had read in Computer World that they were working on a phone top interface for the Google Android platform and I wanted to see a demo if they had one to share. (Oddly enough, Google was not present at CTIA, but the CEO of AT&T brought them up in his speeches somewhat regularly.) The experience they are working on explores using the third dimension of space (horizontal, vertical and depth) as a contextual element for data. This was something I have seen before when research at Microsoft had been investigating just such a concept for a future version of Windows but I’ve never such a thing on a mobile. The phonetop used OpenGL to animate the background, transitions between view panes as well as overall transparency a la the Aero “glass” look on Vista. The demo was running on an emulator the size of a three-ring binder — certainly not a real world scenario by any means — so it remains to be seen what the actual UX will be in the field. I hope it’s at least close to what I saw.

Rounding out the best things was at the dominant Japanese wireless carrier. They had a series of kiosks highlighting games running on their phones. The game that knocked my socks off was a variation of the Sega videogame, Armored Core. What made it remarkable was how similar the gameplay was to the console game; the mecha were engine rendered with jump-jets, full fighting modes and interchangeable gear. It also looked like it was a wireless multiplayer game, so you could fight against someone else on the network, which makes the phone more akin to the Playstation Portable than a phone. It was a geekacular moment.

From there I wandered over to the second largest search behemoth’s (relatively small) booth where they were demoing the upcoming mobile client. I’ve had an eye on their technology since it was announced, so I was pretty well versed already on what their offering was going to mean for the marketplace. Accordingly, I was really just there to pump the marketing reps for inside information. Sadly, there wasn’t much there to report in the way of new intel other than the fact the product remains in flux and will continue to undergo changes up until the release sometime 2Q08. I’ll keep a weather eye for when that happens — essentially this booth chat was neutral if not a bust.

Things went south from there. I stopped off at an astonishingly bad technology company from Toronto, Canada. (I’m embarrassed to even link to their site here, so I won’t). From the get-go I knew something was amiss when I saw that their company’s motto, writ large on the booth was “We are the answer.” Which only makes me wish I had queried their booth staff “To what question?” Anyway the whole idea around their technology was a “background thread application” which “unobtrusively” displays a full screen ad (not a coupon, but an ad) anytime the device owner finishes a phone call. That’s right, you hang up the phone with mom, and your mobile phone hawks Coca-Cola to you. Once the ad is displayed, the user can click “G” (I’m guessing for [G]o) and the application will open the advertiser’s WAP site. The company had flatscreen television mounted on their booth running a looped movie that ended with one of the characters excited about the prospect of being spammed continuously. On their mobile phone. Every time they made a phonecall.

My last booth of the show was of another Seattle area mobile startup. I’m not sure what the history is between Action Engine and this company, but just from the energy the guy in the booth gave out, it’s clear there is some hostility there. (If not animosity, but I’m not sure why that would be the case.) We only chatted for a few minutes about how the company was doing, how their platform launch was coming along and how they were planning on monetizing. (Most of the answers were “that’s on the website.”) He continued to remind me all along the way that they are our competitors (which here at Action Engine we do not consider them to be) and we should be developing content to their platform. We agreed to disagree on that point. I was curious about the guy’s background (his business card said he was a Director of Biz Dev) so I looked him up on LinkedIn.com. In his experience section, the first job (1997 to 2000) listed was at an ecommerce software company. He listed his title at that company as “Schmuck.” Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, I could never be that clever.