Another CTIA Award - Zumobi

Yesterday we congratulated Ontela for winning first place at the CTIA Emerging Technologies (E-Tech) Awards in the Mobile Entertainment and/or Social Networking category.

Another Seattle company, Zumobi, also won a first place award at CTIA in the Consumer Mobile Widgets category, and we wanted to make sure we give them some love too!

The MobilePhoneBlog first wrote about Zumobi last December, when their beta was released. It's great to see them making additional progress. I am personally waiting to see their J2ME version as I don't have a Windows Mobile device. According to their website, it should be coming soon...

“We are thrilled that Zumobi has seen such success at Spring CTIA 2008, and are equally proud to be recognized at the same event we launched at a year ago,” said Eric Hertz, CEO of Zumobi. “We’ve seen tremendous interest in Zumobi at the show from a broad range of business partners, and are honored to be acknowledged for our product. Zumobi is looking forward to continuing product innovation with the upcoming application release that will support a range of J2ME/Blackberry devices.”

Congrats to Ontela

This week at CTIA, Seattle based Ontela, Inc. was awarded first place for their PicDeck technology in CTIA Emerging Technologies (E-Tech) Awards in the Mobile Entertainment and/or Social Networking category. Second place was awarded to Nokia, and third place to Yahoo!. The E-Tech Awards program gives industry recognition and acknowledges the best wireless products and services.

Ontela’s PicDeck technology, already deployed by Cellular South as the “pic sender” service, automatically saves subscribers’ photos to their email, the “My Pictures” folder on their PC, and all their favorite Web photo albums.

“Cellular South is keenly focused on reliable applications that are easy to use and allow the customer to get the most out of their device,” said Jim Richmond, VP of Corporate Communications for Cellular South. “Pic sender has been a huge success for us, delighting customers for the past five months with 24/7 ease of use and reliability. Our customers’ pictures are always delivered where they want them.”

“Simplicity is the foundation of our product,” said Dan Shapiro, Founder and CEO of Ontela. “With a really terrific user experience, consumers who never before considered data services are willing to sign up for a data plan. Our application is so easy anyone can use it, and that means multiplying the data services and
messaging market.”

“The CTIA Emerging Technology Awards recognize the best wireless products and services in the industry,” said CTIA vice president and show director Robert Mesirow. “Congratulations to Ontela for winning first place in the Consumer applications - Mobile entertainment/Social networking category.”

A panel of industry analysts, media and technology experts reviewed nearly three hundred submissions from established and emerging companies and judged product entries based on innovation, creativity and vision.

Stats from CTIA

The U.S. wireless subscriber market now totals in excess of 255 million--roughly 84% of the nation's population--according to new metrics released by industry group CTIA in concert with its CTIA Wireless 2008 event in Las Vegas.

According to CTIA, U.S. subscribers now consume more than 2 trillion minutes of airtime a year and send and receive more than 48 billion text messages per month. Combined data revenues now total about $23 billion a year, accounting for 17% of total carrier revenue.

"These numbers illustrate the incredible volume of traffic carriers successfully manage every day," said CTIA president and CEO Steve Largent during Tuesday's keynote.

Bango releases new products; Movaya listens and learns

Some of the scariest moments you have as a startup founder is watching (via internet press releases / news updates) companies in your sector announce new products that *might* duplicate what your products/services do. Fortunately, you can almost always breathe a sigh of relief after digesting the content of the release or news, for it's rare when that other company actually has a product &/or service that competes with you.

The problem is that I ingest so much info, it's rare that I read something slowly, from start to finish, and more likely, I skim something that catches my eye, like the below snippet from email sent by a PR firm.

From Bango Corporate:
Bango launched Bango Boosted today, an API that is geared to help the mass market take full advantage of a low cost, mobile web presence. Bango Boosted is a web services API meant to enable mobile site builders to deliver Bango features to their customers' sites. mobiSiteGalore from Akmin Technologies is a site building tool designed to integrate with the Bango Boosted APIs and add Bango functionality to its core product. The services will also be available to users of site.mobi, the dotMobi site-building tool powered by mobiSiteGalore. Bango Boosted automatically activates entry level Bango functionality for any mobile website. Bango is looking for other site builder tools to use the API.

Skimming this, I get 'API; enable mobile site; site building tool'. I got a bit jumpy, then I read the entire piece and realized this service compliments us far more than competes with us. In fact, we met Bango at CTIA and might work with them.

CTIA State of the Union

The MPB team spent the last few days at the fall CTIA show in San Francisco. For those of you not familiar with CTIA, they host two events per year - the "Big Show" which takes place in the spring, and the fall show. There were lots of announcements (far too many for us to report on) but we will post a couple highlights that we saw later this week.

In terms of the overall market, things are moving briskly, with the following stats being reported by CTIA:

-As of June 2007 the U.S. wireless consumer market surpassed the 243 million subscriber mark, representing roughly 81% of the overall national population.

-U.S. subscribers now send an average of 1 billion text messages every day, transmitting 28.8 billion messages in June alone.

-Wireless data service revenues for the first half of 2007 rose 63% year-on-year to $10.5 billion. Data revenues account for 15.5% of all wireless service revenues.

-Wireless subscribers in the U.S. sent 2.6 billion MMS messages during the first half of 2007, which is nearly twice as much as last year.

-Wireless customers used more than 1.1 trillion voice minutes in the first half of this year, up 18% year-on-year.