Last week Carnegie Mellon University and Haas Business School at Cal held a one day conference on “The Mobile Future.” The conference featured a clutch of well-known researchers and industry people.

The take away was that perhaps the mobile phone revolution has finally arrived in the USA. It was also interesting to see that very few speakers talked about the mobile revolution that has arrived in the rest of the world. While listening to the speakers I was thinking thinking of last year’s GSMA’s conference in Macau when I got to listen to Softbank’s Masayoshi Son and his vision and strategy for mobile phones in Japan. Or, how the Warner Bros’ honcho finally admitted that perhaps they got it all wrong with music download music business.

The one person who did draw the attention of the audience to what is happening in the rest of the world was Bob Iannucci, Senior VP and CTO of Nokia. He pointed out that the mobile revolution was just getting started even with 3.5 billion mobile phones. He gave a very interesting historical perspective and said, “I am watching a movie I have seen three times.” He was referring to the mainframe phase of prior to 1984 where the value shifted from hardware to services, which was then followed by the mini-computer phase and finally the desktop PC revolution. The point he was making is that through these three phases he witnessed the diversity and incomputable standards resulting in a notion of standard platform. This “standardization of platform” has not happened in the mobile space as yet. He also emphasized how mobile phones were different from computers in that they were a personal device that comes equipped with sensors. (He never really mentioned location-based services or Nokia’s acquisition of Navteq and that was very interesting. I wonder why there was no mention of Navteq considering it was a multi-billion dollar acquisition.)

Dr. Iannucci made a very telling point when he said that with our techno-centric bias (referring to the US and Silicon Valley) we might miss out on how to serve the next billion people that are from emerging markets. What does mobility mean to people in these emerging cultures? That is the biggest challenge for innovation he added. He shared an interesting statistical tidbit that goes to show how strong Nokia is in other parts of the world other than the USA. Did you know that every second Nokia produces 17 mobile phones?

The path to the future according to Dr. Iannucci has to be open and Nokia is open to innovators he stressed. (Just a few weeks ago Nokia launched Nokia Forums to woo developers and users.)

While Dr. Iannucci spoke from the industry’s perspective, David Pogue of NY Times spoke from an American consumer user’s perspective and provided a whole different dimension to the future of mobile . Pogue opened the conference with his hilarious and entertaining speech. He had original video advertisement and musical tribute laced into his speech. Pogue’s speech came from a mobile consumer’s perspective, where he highlighted various service ranging from Grand Central to Cell Wave to iPhone. I videotaped Pogue’s speech that you can watch on YouTube. In Part-1 Pogue talks about the joys of using VOIP and how some telecom companies have failed to integrate their billing system (OSS is a huge problem for many telecos) at the backend.

In Part-2 of the video clip Pogue talks about mobile services like text-to-voice and Google’s cellular 911 service, where you get the information without any advertisements or costs.

In Part-3 he recounts how iPhone was developed in complete secrecy. It was so secret that the CEO of Cingular (now AT&T) did not get to see the final version of the iPhone until 2 weeks before it was publicly launched. Watch the video clip to find out what was the real revolution the iPhone unleashed in the US. Pogue does a very funny and original musical tribute to the iPhone or the “god phone.” He is a broadway guy after all like he reminded the audience. However, his video file clip got corrupted and cut short the musical tribute. And, I guess that is technology for us.

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