Day 2, a.m. – No-Kill Apps and a totally mobile company

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

2nd Day, a.m.

Started out with an early morning seminar on the new API being developed by GSMA to speed up service roll outs. Unfortunately my internal clock was not playing by the rules and I was late to the train. I ended up getting to the room 5 minutes late and the doors were closed, which has meant the place is too full to let anyone else in… quel dommage.

I went to see if I could sneak in and was greeted by the MWC security and told the seminar had been cancelled!! Odd sense of relief that I was not missing anything. She then pointed me towards one of the speakers who was more than happy to give me the one-on-one outline on the one API. Currently, the API only covers the phone wallet, SMS to email forwarding, call routing and call control. There are quite a few companies already working on providing those services.

Due to the cancellation I had more time to explore the rest of the exhibition, however I thought I would first collect some of the unique Android pins. Only a few places had any left and they were only for visitors to the stand. I made a mental note to get there early tomorrow. So, disappointed, I went off to Hall 2 via the embedded house.

This is basically the Smart House using Zigbee or Z-Wave technologies linked back via a cell phone. It covers everything including controlling the heating, power monitoring , lighting, security and health care. One of the winning entries for most innovative use of cellular technology was a medicine container that can alert someone if the medicine was not taken on time. So it could alert you as the user or your family or your doctor. Apparently 47% of all those over 50 on medication forget to take it at the right time. This leads to a multi billion dollar problem for the health insurance companies so they see this as a way of saving patients lives – or should that be money? As the cellular markets begin to saturate, operators are looking for other uses of their networks. AT&T already delivers Kindle books via their network. The others are all looking for other Machine 2 Machine (M2M) applications, and Healthcare seems to be the next killer app or should that be the “not killing app”?

Hall 2 is quite a fascinating collection of small-ish companies (generally startups) living on the backs of or for the cellular industry. It was perhaps one of the more interesting sections since the people you met on the stand generally owned the company or founded the company. Once again, you gain a sense of the human creativity all the way from smart power systems to run all the cell site equipment, to backhaul technologies that in some cases perform better than the network they serve, to management and monitoring software packages that run the networks. For some reason, Symantec was also in the section. Not sure why but they were running a version of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ with all the questions related to virus attacks. Just very odd.

Lunch called at this point and I headed over to Hall 5 for a “Congress Lunch” (I don’t recommend this at all!!!). However I did get to chat with a fascinating and entertaining CIO – yes I know that those characteristics don’t generally go together.

In this case, she ran the agricultural inspection agency for a European country. Her staff is truly nomadic; so much are they road warriors that they decided to eliminate the office and just make everyone mobile. The cloud and universal connectivity made that possible. A huge undertaking, and one that has been successfully accomplished. She trialed all the ideas for 9 months before determining the correct strategy. I also learned more about animal diseases than I really wanted to over lunch. Fortunately, I had fish, otherwise it might have been a bit of a disaster. She was fascinating to listen to. I only wish she had been a speaker at the conference, relating her real world experiences.

Next…device liability and getting the Cloud to work for you.

Tags: mobile employee, wi-fi access