Greetings from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. Ordinarily I'd hate to be inside on such a glorious Indian Summer day here in Northern California, but it's CTIA week, so I'm happily posting from the Billboard Mobile Entertainment Live! conference at the Eslpanade Ballroom here in Moscone ... where, yes, I'm munching on a complimentary chocolate bar shaped like a cell phone.
The show gets started in earnest tomorrow, but today is chock full of "pre-show conferences" including the Billboard event and the Smartphone Summit going on at the nearby Marriot hotel. And, of course, there's the PhoneDog.com Reader Meetup (sponsored by Samsung) this evening over at the Pickwick.
Right now I'm listening to Blake Krikorian, CEO of SlingMedia, talking about placeshifting -- using a device like Slingbox (or the Monsoon HAVA) to take your cable/sattelite TV signal, DVR recorded programs, and other multimedia content and shift it out of your home to your mobile device via the Internet. A tale is being told about a guy who used his Silngbox to watch so much TV on his Motorola Q that he exceeded the quota on his Verizon Wireless "unlimited" data plan. SlingMedia, by the way, was just acquired by EchoStar.
A cool thing about the conference room here is that Mozes is providing a solution to allow folks in the audience to text message questions to the discussion moderators and participants. It's like a very civilized, hi-tech version of one of those TV talk shows where folks can yell out questions from the audience. Pretty cool
Later on there's a discussion about the impact of iPhone on the industry and an appearance by celebrity host Quincy Jones. Then I'm headed over to the Smartphone Summit to check out the state of smartphones and talk to some folks from UIQ (the software behind Sony Ericsson smartphones, among others) about their recent deal with Motorola and, I'd imagine, iPhone's impact on the smartphone biz. For a company who only makes one handset, Apple certainly has made their presence felt in the industry.
Now Blake's talking about using his Nokia N95 to watch cable TV from a hotel room in Japan via his Slingbox back at home in the states. He used the N95's TV Out jack to connect the Slingbox to his hotel room TV, and thanks to 3G data speeds he was able zone out to the tube on a big screen ... from his phone! It's a crazy world, I tell you.
Speaking of crazy, yes, that photo is of me standing next to a banner featuring me. Pretty odd feeling, I gotta say. But, hey, if it gets the word out about PhoneDog, I'm all for it.
More from San Francisco as the day and week at CTIA move on ... Hah, Blake just mentioned iPhone saying of Steve Jobs, "Who knows what Jesus is doing to do down there in Cupertino" ... Good stuff!
