Day 2 Keynote Wrap-Up

The keynotes were kicked off today with Steve Largent and Marty Cooper discussing the first cellphone call made about 35 years ago – it was  a very nice thing. They then presented one another with awards for their respective contributions to the wireless space.  

Next up was Arun Sarin, the CEO of Vodafone explaining how he sees the wireless ecosystem evolving.  It’s no surprise that he sees the mobile broadband experience as revolutionary for the industry.  Arun explained that he feels a single 4Gstandrard would be best in that it would allow greater efficiencies in order to realize greater economies of scale.  That’s an interesting, if not unexpected, take.  He also cited the need for effective network management as the on-network traffic continues to increase. 

Next up on the Keynote Stage was Marco Boerries, President of Yahoo! Mobile.  While there he debuted Yahoo’s new mobile search function, One Search 2.0.  This function incorporates many of the functionalities we have come to expect from the search engines we use on our PCs.  There was also a very cool demo of the voice recognition capabilities of the function.  Something that I found particularly interesting was Boerries thinking that this new mobile, open ecosystem will be too big for 1 one dominant player to emerge,  I think he’s right about that – these new open platforms will mean opportunities for a multitude of different players. 

Following Marco was an infrastructure roundtable featuring the CEO’s of Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Nortel and moderated by VZW’s Lowell McAdam.  Their conversation was an interesting one, dealing with the new implications on network providers in an open, mobile broadband world.

I’m off to the show floor – see you out there!