7 Themes from GSM World Congress

1. VIDEO – REAL OR NOT? - Was pretty interesting to see the progress on the mobile video front (lots of technology work still to do here to make the economics work, but some interesting progress); quite a few EMEA operators have pretty empty UMTS/HSDPA networks so seem less concerned about the spectrum/transport cost than most US operators (was a surprise to me). Companies such as Streamezzo, Penthera are early but some interesting “demos” in this area beyond MobiTV’s historical pitch



2. BROADCAST TECHNOLOGIES - Broadcast technologies such as DVB-H and MediaFlo were also “hot” topics, where a lot of investment spend is headed, although its very early days



3. LOCATION SERVICES (Round 3) - Location-based services seem to be in their 2nd year of the new “renaissance” now that high-accuracy SUPL is starting to really make its way into GSM handsets and expand from the small CDMA corner of the world. No breakthroughs yet beyond the basic navigation and location-finding apps, but plenty of experimentation on moblogging, location-tagged notes, location-enabled social networks, and otherwise..



4. MOVING THE HEAVY STUFF - Some interesting new technologies on transcoding/compression and wireless CDN networks to move around the “heavy” stuff whether photos or videos or otherwise. Similar issues to the Akamai, I-Beam, and other encoder battles of the wireline internet in 1998 I’d observe (i.e. the wireline dial-up to DSL/Cable transition)



5. MOBILE ADVERTISING (real traction starting) - Of course lots of activity on mobile advertising of course – Amobee and AdMob with growing traction, and a few others looking for their angles (rumor: was ThirdScreen media sold to AOL? – was a rumor running around the show – I haven’t talked to Tom B yet to find out)



6. OFF-DECK - European operator openness to off-deck monetization – in private, heard quite a number of senior execs at the operators express openness about this, that I had never heard before. The hardline days of Voda-Live or bust or on-deck IMODE only are softening to be open to credible “incremental revenue” plays even if off-deck. Curious to get your take sometime on how Cingular/ATT would view this going forward.



7. HERE COME THE CHINESE - More broadly as a multi-year trend, was fascinating to see the continued aggressive entry of ZTE, Huawei, Quanta, HTC, and many of the asian players that are helping drive down CAPEX spend versus the traditional incumbents on both network and handset layer (would be tough to be an Alcatel right now I’d think, but this price pressure should be great for Cingular I’d imagine) - see next post

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