What is MOBS About? The Year of the Onslaught

Internally and externally, people have been asking me about MOBS and what it means.

MOBS stands for Mobile Omnipresent Business Solutions, and it's a conference I am putting together for mid-July on the West Coast.

The event’s focus will be still be on Inbuilding but will also encompass the evolving use of mobile throughout retail enterprises, health care, hospitality, public safety, university campuses, and more. It will bring together integrators, international and domestic carriers, professionals in WiMax, LTE, HSPA+, applications developers for Android, iPhone and more. It will also bring together entrepreneurs starting their own companies or managing existing companies that focus primarily on commerce for the mobile devices.

This is an evolving definition, since 2010 is the Year of the Onslaught. This is a year where we will see so many new devices and where behavior of the users of these devices will radically shape the way enterprises are run. If you are interested in being a part of this forum, you can leave a comment on this blog and I will get back to you.

Apple Tablet: Does Tech Solve a Business Crisis?

Things to consider:

The release of the Apple tablet is being considered a solution for the publishing crisis / newspapers crisis / media crisis.

Maybe people are just talking to each other more through other tech means, like mobile phones, and they don't need to consume news that much.

Should journalists be social and community organizers rather than "reporters?" What does reporting accomplish these days? What are you as a reporter if nobody knows your name in the social web?

If the trend away from objective, non-partisan reporting towards being invested in a community is true, than what mobile projects can we develop to bring communities closer? And what does that mean for the mobile industry and the job of telecoms?

The new role of telecom would be the role of social hub. Telecoms that are more aware of the social habits of their customer base could service them better. What I don't know is whether the amazing amount of data use brought on by Android apps, iPhone apps and the like have given telecoms any more profounder insight into how to service their end-users.

In this way, perhaps tech can solve a business crisis, for telecoms and media, but I think it's really more likely that understanding humans helps move business forward.

Marshall Brown, CEO, Wired Towns

Our latest speaker to join the MOBS forum is Marshall Brown, who is the founding CEO of Wired Towns.

We talked at a party last night in New York City hosted by Steve Masur of Masur Law.

(Readers of my Fast Company blog might remember that I wrote about him last week in an article about the legal ramifications -- or not -- of Augmented Reality.)

Marshall told me that after leaving Harvard, where he was working on a thesis for his PhD, he decided to work in the mobile telecoms space.

He ended up doing quite a bit, including gearing areas in New York City for free wi-fi access.

You can see a video of him on Fox Business News here: Is free wi-fi coming to a city near you?

Marshall is also blogging over at his company site, Wired Towns.

Speaker Updates

It's that time of the production cycle when I let you all in on the fabulous companies that have come on board as speakers and supporters of the forum.

Here's a list of companies that will be supporting the Mobile Omnipresent Business Solutions forum with their speakers:

Reliance Communications (India)
Sprint Nextel
Mobients
T-Mobile
AT&T
Effective UI
Health Hero
Mobifoundry
Apisphere
TomTom (China)
WiMax Italia (Italy)
Tishman Technologies
Raytheon
Motorola
Federal Office for High Performance Green Buildings -- U.S. General Services Administration
Vornado Realty Trust
CTO from Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group
Quantum Networks
K-Edge Networks
MobileTribe
Sintnow
ProvenPowerful
RF Wise
Engineer for Cisco Systems
ABI Research
CIO from VA Health System VISN 20 Health Care
CTO of Alcatel-Lucent
IIT
InBuilding Wireless Alliance


I will be adding to this throughout the day and throughout the holidays into 2010. Keep in mind that we do have some room on our quickly filling panels. If you want to be considered for a slot and you can:

*Discuss strategy for using mobile for business
*Provide insights into telecoms operations, pricing and development of the inbuilding and data spectrums
*Talk about your enterprise's use of mobile as a business tool
*Consider the pros and cons of wireless hospital infrastructure

We want to hear from you. Please send me an email at dcrets [at] iirusa [dot] com. I am happy to talk with you in detail about the agenda, and send you a version of it.

Top Ten Gaming Apps on the iPhone

These are the top ten highest grossing iPhone Apps, and interestingly the first few are created by big gaming companies, like EA.

The Droid: Hype or Happening?

Remember when you were young and dating for the first time? I bet someone, your mom or your dad, or maybe a sister or brother, told you that you should never put your heart out there all at once.

It's best to keep 'em guessing a little bit, showing a little of the greatness you possess, but not all.

Apparently, this strategy works very well with releasing a game-changer phone.

The go-slow, reveal little approach to releasing the Droid seems to have worked well for Verizon.

I'm actually thinking of getting this phone, even though I was left longing when I signed up for the iPhone 2.0 release.

Is this the year for too much hype? Does anyone out there have the Droid? Does it perform well? I like Verizon's call network and data network. I don't think I've ever had a dropped call in the one and half years I have had Verizon service.

What really I want to know about is how does the phone perform on the user level?

Monitoring the Friday Telecom Twittering

These are the current conversations I am following today on Twitter. They are the "what's happening" in mobile that is keeping me interested and tuning my analysis at the moment.

@sesemic is talking about Virgin Mobile Canada as the fifth outlet for iPhone sales.

@wirelessbroad is following the use of netbooks as this big push for mobile broadband.

The move to volume-sell and market computers is a major step for operators used to selling tightly specified handsets under long-standing commercial relationships. To ensure that this move is profitable, operators need to be alive to the risks and to maximise the opportunities for market share growth, pull-through revenue and data service ARPU.

Fair enough, but I'm more interested in what's being put on netbooks. What applications are the big heat-seeking missiles for users right now?

@andrewparkerft is reporting on what he's hearing at the FT telecoms conference and he points out that 3, the mobile provider, won't feel competition from a drop in market participants from five to four. He also, interestingly, points out that Etisalat warns that "network sharing" is urgently needed in Africa.

@Blackipresnews says that Deutsche Telekom is looking for US partners to help grow the T-mobile network, which is building out its HPSA+ network following the launching of that network in the US.

Mobile Health Initiatives Heating UP

In the past couple of days, I have received a few emails from some members of LinkedIn groups that I belong to mentioning the tremendous groundswell being generated by federal funds allocations slated for the mobile and wireless industries. This is the much heralded American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA.

A colleague in the industry forwarded me two pieces of intelligence out there. I will link you to one of them, here: This is the mHealth Initiatives cluster of target areas for growth.

Points to pull out from there:

•Drug databases
•Medical calculators
•Reference programs
•Decision support for both physicians and nurses
•Tracking (weight, blood pressure, etc.)
•Patient history accessing, managing, and documenting
•Communication managers
•Payer tools (coding, eligibility determination, etc.)

The same colleague found this bit of information and I thought it would be useful, as well:

The research firm [Pike & Fischer] predicts that wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel will become key players in the increasingly wireless-enabled telemedicine market, while smaller companies like software developers and device makers will be key acquisition targets. AT&T is likely to dominate, however, the report predicted. The firm also points to the need to control health care costs as another driver of the growing telemedicine market, while stimulus funding from ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) will lead to more remote patient monitoring services and mobile access to EHRs, according to Pike & Fischer.

Have Doctors found a Smart Phone They Can Use?

Jeff Brandt sent me a link to this blog posting about the emergence of the Droid phone as a real mobile device tool for doctors.

The comments are interesting. One commenter points out that the rumored Apple tablet device is a game changer and more able to be a doctor's device.

The link is provided by Leonard Kish, who further leads me to this blog post about about the health care internet.

Looks like several blogs are going into the feeder read today.

New: Global Retail Executive Council

I managed to find this blog about the growth in interactivity, engagement and mobility in the retail experience when I got an email in my inbox this morning.

So I called up their executive director to find out more about it. Jim Crawford, Executive Director,Global Retail Executive Council, spoke to me while he was on his way to a meeting. The organization started up in February, right as the great dregs from the economic tsunami were washing up on the beaches of commerce and retail.

"It proved a great time to start up this association," says Crawford.

The organization serves two missions:

1. Nurturing and building on the broad and inclusive concept of what it means to be a sustainable retailer, improving the economic model for retailers, building on being able to have a sustainable relationship with consumers, and helping them grow through life cycle of interaction with the consumer through the interaction and nexus of mobile devices and technology and the shopping experience

2. Collaborating with retailers on next generation customer experiences in retail, building on changes and the evolution in the store experience using mobile

"It’s a radical game changer in the way retailers look at technology at stores," says Crawford. I agree.

We talked about how the carriers are vital to this growth but that at the same time, we are seeing huge customer-driven changes brought on by data-loving retail shoppers and end users of mobile.

More on this later, as it develops.

"Cloud-Bursting," by AT & T

Fast Company has a brief mention of the IBM and AT&T cloud computing systems that they are rolling out in the next few years.

Blue Insight by IBM and the AT&T "cloud-bursting" synaptic system will enable data to be stored elsewhere.

Fast Company talks about the security issues with other systems that might make the AT&T system an attractive offer for small businesses:

AT&T's goal seems to be to leverage its big-name status and existing business relationships to attract potential customers who may be wary of cloud computing from other providers, due to data security issues and cybercrime events like Distributed Denial of Service attacks. AT&T will roll out the service to U.S. networks first, and then onto its global data centers so it can be sold to clients around the world.

It's what is available for small enterprises that excites me, because, deductively, I wonder what it is that small business is focused on doing, as a collective.

To me it seems that the small business mindset is:

1. Stay small, in order to grow quickly, virally, in other people's computers, mobile devices and applications.

2. Be outward facing all the time -- no better way to face outward than through synaptic text, data and a collective applications system.

3. Be all over the place, at scale, but small enough that people are not encumbered by your presence. See number one.

This new age of small business, social entrepreneurship, javascript:void(0)social networking and all just keeps going and going.

Where is The Cloud?

This was a rather interesting, if simple, story about what happens when you store things on the internet.

Looking into The Cloud of cloud computing and storage.

The Intelligence Group Forms

Right now I am in the process of putting together an Intelligence Group for Mobility Industries.

See below:

It’s time for a world-class globally scalable wireless, 3G and 4G forum that deals with content, applications, systems engineering and general business development for all of the important verticals in the mobile world.

SMART, the global forum for convergence and operational excellence across mobility industries, will be launching in June 2010 in the United States.

From implementation, engineering and distribution to content, user-experience, business development, product development and new frontier uses in transport, healthcare, entertainment, utilities, venues, property development, data and mobile broadband.

We are searching for information on the experience of working in mobile communications from some of the brightest minds in those verticals. We would like to talk with you for five minutes about the most important facets of your job and your industry, so that we can invite you to be a speaker to a forum that faces your industry on a global scale.

If you could take the time to talk with Douglas Crets, Director of the SMART Forum, it would really help us to scale the event accordingly and invite the top people to attend.

You can reach me at +1 646 616 7627 or dcrets@iirusa.com

You can also join our blog, Signal Up, as it gets started and revises itself in this space.

If you are interested in being a blogger (anonymously or named), please email dcrets [@]iirusa [dot] com . We will talk with you about this.

Best,

Douglas Crets
SMART Director
New York, New York
+1 646 616 7627