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Primary Contributors:
Shelby Cunningham
Maya Jasmin
Myra Moore
Greg Scoblete
Jing Sui
Stewart Wolpin
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Monday June 14, 2012 – Stewart Wolpin
Here at the just-wrapped spring version of the CTIA Wireless mobile communications show in New Orleans, the buzz on the show floor isn't about new phones or new technologies. The buzz was about the show floor, or, more precisely, what and who was NOT at CTIA.
Only two major phone vendors, LG and HTC, had booths. No Samsung, no Motorola, no Nokia, no BlackBerry (and, obviously, no Apple). None of the four major national carriers had anything more than "innovations" spaces (Verizon and AT&T) – Sprint held meetings off campus, and I saw neither hide nor hair of T-Mobile.
While officials touted the 40,000-plus attendees, and city and venue officials noted CTIA was the largest convention New Orleans had hosted post-Katrina, the show floor felt small and barren, especially compared to past shows in Atlanta and Orlando.
Why? I spoke to several officials from these usually anchor exhibitors and the reason came down to three letters: CES.
Just as smartphones are absorbing the functions of standalone devices such as cameras and GPS devices, CES is absorbing standalone shows. This year, it was PMA that CES subsumed. And with so many eyes on it, consumer cellular companies opt to unveil their latest and greatest in Las Vegas or at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.
By spring CTIA, there's little to spend money on exhibiting to report.
Maybe this is just me, but I've never understood why CES, which encompasses the entire consumer electronics product universe, requires one show, but the wireless industry needs two.
2012: The Year of NFC?
While there was a dearth of new handsets on display, perhaps the biggest impact at CTIA came from Visa and MasterCard, both of whom had fairly large exhibits.
It seems that, finally, NFC and mobile ecommerce will take off this year. Even though both credit card companies are hawking mobile wallet solutions – Visa has PayWave and its two-week-old V.me walletservice (which inaugurated on Buy.com), and MasterCard has created the PayPass service, both are members of the ISIS mobile wallet consortium, and both have created iOS and Android wallet apps – each is taking a different approach to perfecting shopping via smartphone.
Visa sees consumers using their mobile phones instead of a credit card in increasing numbers as the number of NFC-enabled phones leap from nine (Samsung, Nokia and BlackBerry) to 90 in the next year, according to Visa president John Partridge, with whom I sat down with at CTIA.
Whether these 90 NFC-enabled smartphone models include iPhone 5 no one knows – or at least no one is officially confirming (even though there have been hints). The inference, however, was that an NFC-enabled iPhone 5 would certainly accelerate consumer NFC acceptance and use.
Visa is working on several NFC issues such as security – both on the technical side and allaying consumer fears – as well as value-added NFC functions, such as couponing and redemption at point-of-sale, sales and receipt notifications, linking loyalty programs, the ability to check balances before purchase, etc.
MasterCard, however, considering the dearth of and reliance upon NFC-enabled handsets, is taking a wait-and-see attitude towards handset-as-credit/debit card. Instead, MasterCard wants consumers to feel more comfortable using their smartphone as a mobile ecommerce platform.
According to Ed Olebe, MasterCard's mobile wallet services head, many people shop (in the browsing sense) on their smartphones – arguably the most ubiquitous shopping platform ever created – but fewer than 1.5 percent of consumers actually complete their transaction on their handsets, which means maybe they NEVER complete the transaction.
Why? Filling in the shipping and/or billing name/address/credit card numbers on that small keyboard and small screen is way too tedious, and sending this sensitive personal and financial data over the air from potentially unknown shopping sites makes many smartphone shoppers uncomfortable.
So MasterCard is creating a raft of trusted wallet services all with an automated PayPass service at their heart – just click on the PayPass payment option, and all your previously-stored-with-MasterCard credentials are filled in for you.
By promoting payment ON a smartphone rather than BY a smartphone, MasterCard hopes to generate more business for itself and its retail clients, which would then make it easier for the company to step consumers up to use MasterCard PayPass services on an NFC-enabled smartphone, if and when.
While it will still take time for mobile ecommerce to truly take off – Partridge believes it will take three-to-five years before NFC point-of-sale terminals reach a critical mass – the presence of Visa and MasterCard certainly made CTIA worthwhile, at least for me.
Monday April 30, 2012 – Myra Moore
Not to get all “snow flakey” but no two places are alike. And when it comes to tallying up all the factors for a digital TV switchover, countries within the Caribbean region are as different as individual snowflakes even though (as far as I know) it’s never snowed there.
One of the CTU’s primary goals is to promote a unified approach to the regional digital TV switchover, which is never an easy task amongst separate nations. Job number one is to coordinate spectrum use within the region and to ensure that all in-region countries/territories are informed of their neighbors’ DTT plans and potential interference issues are discussed. After that, there’s not a whole lot of uniformity as the geographic area is large, islands have different ties to other countries in Europe and North America, and existing TV ecosystems are a mash up different transmission standards, types of pay TV providers, and regulations.
Just a handful of facts illustrating how important customization will be in individual locales:
- The islands are a mix of sovereign states and dependent territories. Even those that are sovereign nations have deep ties to European and North American countries that can have significant influence on the technology and policy decisions when building digital terrestrial TV systems. In short, European affiliated islands tend to consider systems similar to those in the U.K., the Netherlands, and France, while those associated with North America lean toward technologies implemented in the U.S. This, however, is a generalization; other factors come in to play.
- Because the region is geographically closest to North, Central and upper South America, much of the existing analog TV infrastructure is based on the North American NTSC system. Thus, islands will have different mixtures of analog and digital TV systems that impact the sourcing of receivers.
- The region is demographically and linguistically diverse. With French, Dutch, English, Spanish, Creole (Haiti), and Papiamento official languages, the need for customization is even greater. The DTC Digital TV Transition Group is producing an analog-to-digital TV educational video for Curacao in Papiamento. This is an official language in three places in the world – Curacao, Aruba and Bonaire with a collective population of about 300,000 people.
- Demographic diversity contributes to varying rates of pay TV household penetration (as well as platforms from which services are delivered – MMDS systems are a part of the TV mix in addition to satellite, cable and IPTV). Individual-island pay TV penetration can vary from barely measurable to 90%. Thus, business models are going to vary significantly.
The need for customization only underscores the need for a top-level unified framework where, at the minimum, spectrum management is a harmonized effort.
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