CTIA Wireless 2007 – there’s no doubt about it, content is still king… however, simplicity and ease of use are indeed “the killer app”.

That was the message presented in sessions, demonstrations, panel discussions, and meetings at North America’s recent wireless industry convention.

Some of the key impressions I took away from the event include the following:

- mobile content is king and the industry (and users) are craving more mobile content – in particular entertainment.

- Application developers have plenty of opportunities, although the competition is brisk. Simple to use, intuitive applications are what people want. Make it functional, entertaining, useful, and simple.

- Location-based services and applications are hot and in demand. Think about it, there were more than 340 entries in this year’s North American LBS Challenge. Looking to get your LBS app on a device? Think social networking, community building, entertainment, and gaming… these appear to be the LBS services that are of greatest interest (to carriers and end users)

- GPS-enabled devices are coming on strong.

- Developing applications for a variety of handsets, operating systems, and languages is still a challenge. It’s still quite amazing to see many applications that have been created to run solely on one application or even one device.
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The One Web Principle, which is at the heart of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, is challenging at many levels.

The aim is to have a Web page that can deliver a satisfactory user experience whatever the device used, whether desktop PC or cell phone. Part of the suggested solution involves a device detection process, which can then modify what is delivered to the device. There are many technical challenges here but possibly they could all be solved.

Dwarfing the technical challenges are the challenges involved in getting all the stakeholders to work in concert with agreed standards. The consensus process involved in getting all to agree and work with the same standards takes time.

In a fast evolving world like the Mobile web, where large profits are to be made quickly, big players may choose to move pre-emptively to seize competitive advantage. Divergency rather than convergence would seem to be the natural outcome. (more…)