Mobile Partnerships

from the a-Techdirt-Corporate-Intelligence-Report dept

Mobile Partnerships

Over the past few years, companies that are creating any sort of wireless offering have come to the conclusion that their market is limited to a relatively small number of carriers. Over and over again, wireless startups announce that they are focusing on the carrier market, since those carriers control the network and the end-users. The companies hope that once they have a deal in place with at least one carrier, they will rely on those carriers to get their products to end-users.

We attended the Strategic Research Institute's Mobile Partnerships conference December 10th and 11th in San Francisco to figure out just how wireless companies could make those relationships. We came away wondering if there are any deals worth doing with the carriers.

This report gives a quick overview of various players in this market place as they were discussed during the conference. This is followed by a discussion of some of the attitudes and opinions towards partnering expressed by each side.

The overall summary is that while there is tremendous potential in the wireless realm, there is still a huge gap in understanding between the carriers and the other players. At this point, it is unclear who will be able to clear this gap. Moving the wireless data industry forward is going to take a tremendous amount of work from players at all different types of companies. Understanding the views, attitudes, plans, and relationships of many of these companies is a first step in trying to understand what is happening in this chaotic market.

The Mobile Partnerships Conference was an excellent resource for getting a detailed understanding of the market place from the perspective of many of the players on all sides of the various issues. Any company hoping to make a splash in the wireless industry is at a severe disadvantage not understanding the important issues laid out and discussed at the conference.