This
year's Bell Wireless Internet Conference was targeted at Business Decision
Makers and Hard Core Wireless Application Developers. The day-long event
featured a single-morning stream of five keynote-style presentations and an
afternoon filled with about 14 different breakout sessions that were spread out
over four different time slots. During lunch, breaks, and while not in sessions,
attendees could keep themselves busy visiting the thirty to forty companies
exhibiting on the National Trade Centre show floor of the Canadian National Exhibition
venue in Toronto.
The President of Bell Mobility, Michael Neuman, kicked off the morning as the
first presenter.
To set the tone, Michael started off by recalling his first day at university,
sitting in a large lecture hall filled with business students as the professor
asked the thousands of students to turn and introduce themselves to both the
person on their left, and on their right. As a nervous student, on his first day
at this new school, he then recalled the impact of what the professor followed
up with. The professor's request wasn't intended to simply promote social
interaction amongst the class, but instead to drive home the point that two out
of every three people in the room were not going to make it to graduation
day. As I looked around at the attendants seated, listening to his keynote
address, I half expected him to mention that the opposite was true of this
industry, and that wireless opportunities would lead to a tripling of the number
of companies doing data and location solutions in the next five years.
However, Bell Mobility's President instead described how he expects that many
businesses will go out of business if they do not embrace the changes that are
happening. The last twenty years in the industry were about voice, he explained,
and the next 20 years are are all about mobile data. Apparently, from
January 2003 until today, Bell Mobility's data revenue has doubled and the data
traffic on their network is doubling or tripling every six months. I found
it somewhat ironic that he read his presentation from a stack of paper-based
notes as he described how technical innovation would lead eventually to
"Desktop Speeds" in the future for mobile operator networks. As
a Windows Mobile developer I was a little disappointed to hear the emphasis that
he placed on Java and Blackberry technologies during his talk and thought that
it was unfortunate that he didn't seem to have the time to stay and listen to
the Microsoft presentation that followed.
However, even Bill McQuain, the North American Director of Mobility for
Microsoft was talking about their own recipe to bake Blackberry technology into
some future models of Windows Mobile devices. Bill also shared some of the most
recent stats with us on the growing support for their mobile platforms. There
are now 50+ mobile operators on board to sell Windows Mobile devices which are
coming from over 40 different OEMs. He also mentioned that there are now
more than 10 distinct designs for Pocket PC Phone Edition devices and 9 distinct
Smartphone designs.
I
spent some time exploring the exhibit floor where I came across a manufacturer (Itronix)
of a rugged Pocket PC that I hadn't heard of before. I also spent a
few minutes questioning a representative from Seirra Wireless who tells me that
the Voq "Developer's Kit" is ready to go even though my most recent
visits to their developer site had it being described as "coming
soon". Unfortunately the Voq is not yet available in a CDMA version, so it will be a while before you can use one on the Bell network. I had hoped to
be able to dig up more information on the show floor about new Windows Mobile
devices that might be coming to the Bell network, but to no avail.
Other interesting sights located in the exhibit hall included Steve
Lombardi, your favourite MapPoint Technical Evangelist from Redmond, as he test
drove a Segway. This Human Transporter was just one of the funky high-tech
transportation devices on display in Baka's booth. Steve presented on
MapPoint Location Server during the Location Based Services breakout
session and was available to field questions and do demonstrations at the MSDN
booth along with a number of other locally recognizable Microsoft Evangelists.
I expected sessions with a little more technical content, from an event
billed
as being for "Hard Core Wireless Application Developers". There
was a session called "Developing Mobile Applications - Best Practices"
that I sat through. From what I could tell, "Bell Mobility's brightest
content partners", as they were described in the program overview, were
under the misinformed impression that developing Java-based apps and producing
applications that featured major brand names, somehow constituted sound
development tips and best practices. This conference left me with the
feeling that Bell, as seems to be the case with many North American mobile
operators, still perceives Java-based development as strategically more
significant than supporting development for the Windows Mobile platform.
However, one of the "Best Practice" presenters was from a software
publisher that was pushing a tool to manage the nightmarish process of code
management that Java developers need to go through in order to run their
applications on the hundreds of different incompatible Java devices that they
need to support. The value and distribution chain that they are promoting
seems unnecessarily 'linky' with many middlemen which probably results in a very
small piece of the revenue going the actual developer who created the product,
kind of like how I imagine the record industry works. I really hope the
mobile software industry doesn't become what they were describing.
I spoke with other developers, some who had flown in from the west coast of
Canada, and they too found value in attending this conference, not so much from the sessions, but for the industry networking and to
better understand where this mobile operator is at
and where they are heading.