What did the attendees think of CTIA San Francisco?

By Mickey Alam Khan

September 12, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO -- Quiet, busy, no theme, great leads, love the networking: those disparate opinions summed up the attitudes to this week's CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2008 conference.
Here's a sampling of what key exhibitors and delegates had to say about the show as well as what they heard:

Mitch Paletz
Head of publisher acquisition for the Americas, Nokia, New York

This show is highly beneficial for me because of the presence of the publisher community. You have all the major brands here. Fundamentally, it's about monetization. How can we increase the monetization with our mobile properties and what's the outlook.

Conrad Lisco
Creative director, 5th Finger, San Francisco

Well, it's no MMA show, for sure. But it was really good to hear the guys from the carriers speak.
You know what I think is really interesting about this industry is that people at the top -- CEOs, CMOs -- understand that mobile is a really important thing. So why is it that the CEO of a wireless company understands that and the CEO of a brand doesn't?

Steen Andersson
Vice president of marketing, 5th Finger, San Francisco

One of the things about the Yahoo keynote is that the [newly announced Blueprint] tools are going to create applications that look very pretty much the same. So it doesn't have the same promise for marketers as it does for application developers.

One of the carrier representatives at the show commented on the carriers adding value content. My gut tells me they need to focus on being the best possible network provider. There's still a lot of work to be done with carriers -- there's dropped calls, there's poor service.

Jonathan Linner
CEO, Limbo, Burlingame, CA

Being a local show, I spent less time here than I have in the past year. It feels like a little lower key than past years. There's fewer things going on. The quality of what's going on is probably better … It's not as packed. It feels like there's a transition going on.

Dave Oberholzer
Vice president of corporate development, Limbo, Burlingame, CA

I think there's less fluff. There's real business. There's a lot of energy in mobile advertising. It really depends on where you are.

Oz Eleonora
Senior vice president, Acision

I think we're starting to get down to the nitty-gritty of what is going to make content -- media and general services -- in mobile work. And the essence is separation of the access bundle versus the discrete services.

Meaning, when I pay a carrier for a bundle, I pay for access and basic modes of data transport. And what services I consume is a matter of my own choice. And the carrier will make their own margin from the revenue share that they get from the discrete service bundles. Because the access bundle is used for land grab and market-share protection.

Eswar Priyadarshan
Chief technology officer, Quattro Wireless, Waltham, MA

What's happening is an across-the-board mainstreaming of mobile and mobile advertising. It's certainly well past the if and when. It's happening now.

Also, I see a concerted effort by the mobile marketers and the Yahoos to come at Apple with their approach offering. It's interesting to go to a mobile show with no Apple on site.

Eric Harber
President and chief operating officer, Hipcricket, Kirkland, WA

It's been a very good show mainly because of the meetings we've had surrounding the show. As much as we'd like to attend sessions, we've been so busy tied up in meetings.

Jeff Hasen
Chief marketing officer of Hipcricket, Kirkland, WA

To me, it's smaller but it's more focused. A year later, the talks have more meat to them.

John Tremblay
Vice president of marketing at Azuki Systems, Acton, MA

It seems like it used to be a lot of niche themes at this entertainment show. It seems now like entertainment is becoming the theme.

Traffic has been good. Traditionally I think of this as a mobile operator show as in mobile operators responsible for entertainment. But I think with direct-to-consumer strategies of content, publishers know they can go off-deck.

They can begin to deploy more of their own strategy. We're seeing more direct touch as opposed to will they play by the rules of the carriers.

Ray Anderson
CEO, Bango, Cambridge, England

Lots of meetings. Seems busy and buzzy. The show actually started before it actually started -- meetings with other booths here.

Not enough chairs.

Bill Dudley
Group director of product management at Sybase 365, Reston, VA

It's an interesting show. At first I thought there's no real buzz to this show in fall. Contrast that to 3GSM in Barcelona or the big [CTIA] show in Vegas. At each one of those shows there is always a buzz about whatever the industry de jure is. Last time at CTIA it was WiMAX and LTE.

But now today I'm thinking mobile widgets seems to be a pervasive theme. And it's gotten me thinking of how our product line at Sybase 365 can work with that kind of mobile widget ecosystem.

Traffic too for us has been good. At minimum, a show like this is that is much more focused on mobile content, entertainment and enterprise still offers excellent networking opportunities.