CTIA was huge, as per normal, and for me the biggest problem was the sheer number of people using the WiFi system, effectively grinding it to a halt quite often. More than one person I spoke to had an EV-DO card and was using that.
As for the buzz, I’m not sure I can capture that from an event of this size. A lot of people were talking about the need to improve the buying experience of the customer. It was hard to run national ads for content on carriers decks because there is no clear way to tell people how to get it. All the big brands I spoke to were continuing to target the operator deck because 95% of sales were still through them. Interestingly, carriers are more open to supporting off-deck portals and billing. A year ago everyone was saying how they were dead against it, and now people are saying the carriers have realised they need to support off-deck and they are…to greater or lesser degrees. They’ve even express interest in using memory cards to sideload content rather than do it over the network — Macroport told me they were interested because they figure people are going to sideload anyway, at least if the operators supply the cards they can have pointers to their own shops. Still, the carriers have to get some slice of the pie. If someone suggests a business plan that doesn’t involve giving money to carriers, the general impression is that the carriers will just block them, or make life difficult any way they can.
Another side to that is the idea of social networks to distribute content, throught formal recommendations as well as through viral marketing. User-generated content is an added bonus of that.
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