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The first 45 days of any year for a digital media consultant typically means lots of travel. After all, even if Macworld and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) don’t fall on the exact same days, the choice of which to go to is not eliminated: it just means you get to make two trips to the west coast - one to Vegas and one to San Francisco.
Then there are the other shows that creep up and around the end of January; this year I attended Video 08, a trade show in Orlando geared toward those who do event videography for a living and who are discovering streaming media as a huge sales, marketing and revenue vein that can keep brides, graduates and mitzvah goers happy for years to come.
Packing it all in
Then, in early February, the small (tiny?) screen show takes place in Barcelona, the recently renamed Mobile World Congress.
This year’s press bags for both the Vegas and Barcelona events were decent backpacks; and, while I normally give up the goods for the kids (as one journalist waiting in the press line said: “I never have to buy my girls a back pack for school”) I chose to put these two packs to a real-world test in a climb up Monserrat to the Sant Jeroni chapel and overlook.
Turns out each one was useful after all, and not just for carrying a few pieces of swag and tons of marketing slicks picked up during the week-long booth troll [Note to PR firms: the trend toward USB thumb drives is a very good idea, especially if it combines multiple companies together].
Then there is the writing. Between the Sourcebook, Streaming Media’s year in review (and trend predictor) that I contribute to, the regular writing from each day at the shows and finalizing market analysis / go-to-market strategy reports for clients, the early part of the year turns into a 25,000 to 30,000 word marathon that keeps the consulting juices flowing and done to avoid the “2 year consulting” plague of cash-cow consulting that relies on old data.
So that, hopefully, is it for the winter break trade show travel schedule. Not that the travel slows down, as I’ve got client projects in late February and early March, then some personal travel for a few weddings, followed by the next big shows take place in April, May and June, with NAB, Streaming Media East and the Infocomm-NSCA-NxtComm glom in sequential order.
Makes one tired just thinking about the schedule, but we do what needs to be done, and often travel so that you - or our clients - don’t have to.
This year’s Mobile World Congress, the show formerly known as 3GSM World Congress, has embraced “radio agnosticism” as a way to push mobile technologies of all kinds forward - including CDMA, WiMax, Long Term Evolution (LTE) among others.
In town covering the show for Streaming Media (www.streamingmedia.com), I stopped by the Vodafone store closest to the Fira, to check on why my Vodafone chip from Italy wasn’t working in Spain. The very helpful attendant first said my phone, purchased in Switzerland in 2006, didn’t work on Vodafone’s Spanish network.
A Vodafone is a Vodafone is a Vodafone
Turns out it wasn’t the phone, or that I’d not registered on Vodafone’s network - had tried that before looking for a store - or even that I was using a phone that was two years old (try carting a clunky Motorola to a trade show dinner with Nokia, where N95 and E71 handsets abound, although I did score with the multi-hinged Samsung I carry in my back pocket by habit even when I’m not in a country with Verizon coverage - err, every country except the United States).
Turns out I needed to buy a new SIM chip since I’d not used any of my minutes in the last year, which meant I was going to pay Euros 24 for the ability to text a colleague who had picked up my apartment key. Since I’d exhausted all other means of connecting, including texting from “free SMS” pages and sending emails, and it was 8:30 PM (30 hours since I’d slept horizontally), it was worth expense.
While I waited for my turn at the Vodafone store, I had a chance to look at the new HSDPA modems, glance at the touch-sensitive phones and look over service plans. It struck me that two of three issues holding back universal connectivity are about ready to be addressed.
The first is a consistent universal platform for voice and data connectivity. The recent decisions by Verizon, AT&T and many other wireless carriers to adopt LTE - and the move to include WiMax as a portion of LTE’s growth - put this possibility into play within the nex three years.
The second, announced as part of European Commission’s Commissioner of Telecommunications presentation at Mobile World Congress, is an end to egregious data roaming charges. While the iPhone’s move into cutting data into flat-rate pricing may have been partly on Viviane Reding’s mind as she warned mobile operators to fix excessive data roaming charges in the same way they fixed mobile voice charges - or risk having the roaming charge reductions forced up on them - the deadline of June 2008 can’t come soon enough. For Europe to gain the benefits of its union when it comes to easily moving between countries and still doing business at a reasonable cost, data roaming charges, and flat-rate data services for that matter, desperately need modernization.
The third area still outstanding - global data and roaming service agreements at a reasonable cost - may be addressed by external market forces as large conglomerates such as Telefonica, Vodafone, 3 and others find customer demand equal-price roaming across group countries. A move like this could have just as much bearing on the business strategies of small- and medium-size businesses as flat-rate intranational mobile voice pricing and services such as Vonage has had on trade between Europe and the US.
