I’m still in San Francisco but the rush of the conference has worn off and now the tiredness comes in. It’s been a great show for us and a fun couple of days.
It was good that I knew so many people still from the Barcelona conference. Especially the guys from Useful Networks; when I flew in on Wednesday we had dinner and went to the TC50 party, the Greystripe party, and ended up in the Clift where everybody seemed to have a big night, and it went downhill from there.
The thing that makes this conference actually interesting is that it’s not as big as Barcelona, and that is more focused towards developers. This means that from every 10 people I meet, there’s a lot more connection and opportunity than meeting the same number of people at Barcelona. It takes a lot of noise away. It’s not as rushed, so you can actually have a conversation instead of just exchanging pitches and business cards.
Friday I attended the Mobile Jam Session which was not only a good event because of the beers, food and phone giveaways, but mostly because there were developers, operators, manufacturers, and signing companies having an open discussion about the difficulties of the industry and how to move forward with them. There was a great animation artist documenting the session. I took a picture from this post, and I can’t wait to see the full version of the artwork.
The difficulties for us to enter the US market would be the BREW issue (porting to yet another platform), getting ourselves on deck (available on their platforms) and location enabled with the providers, as well as updating our handset support with all the models that are out there in the American Market (that strange country where they still use CDMA2000). The last couple of days I’ve gathered the ingredients to start tacking these problems one by one.
