Don Listwin keynote, 11/13/00

Chmn, OpenWave systems

 

Hoarse – soft-spoken.

 

Freedom – will demonstrate a technology that enables personal freedom.

 

Mobile technology has been built for 100 years around open standards – tip and ring, DTMF. Mobile wars are an extension of that.

 

Interconnection, voicemail.

 

SMS – 20 billion messages per month worldwide. Not a US experience, but beginning to come here.

 

Used IM, mobile email to locate their employees on September 11th.

 

Internet – started as a distributed transport system for DoD.

 

Killer app – messaging, email, Unix POKEs. Started the tornado of the Internet.

 

Netscape – new standards for presentation.

 

Security – Public key, encryption helped move ecommerce move forward.

 

Imaging – moving video around the network.

 

Concatenation of open standards makes the Internet the most ubiquitous comm. System in the world.

 

30 billion IM messages per month in the US alone.

 

50 billion short messages a month, but they are disjoint. How to merge them?

 

Build communities, then build content and commerce.

 

The mobile Internet myth: a PC strapped to your leg.

 

The realities? Geographic realities –

 

WAP is crap, WAPlash – reality is that European experience is horrible. No one would use it. Thought they would surf the Internet on their phones, when they should have been building communities.

 

In US, Sprint, Nextel, Verizon, others building more value.

 

Japan’s success – myths about it. Where are the lessons?

 

In Japan – 65 million phones, 40 million have mobile Internet.

 

Need great user device, non-glacial user experience, application environment people want to use (in Japan example, imaging application from built-in camera.)

 

“There is no mobile Internet”? 84 million people use it worldwide, from 8 million in March 2000. Has been led from Japan, we are learning in North America. In transition between telephony standards and Internet standards.

 

Why doesn’t MI work in the US? First, poor handsets.

 

New handset shipments – 400 to 500 billion per year. All are mobile data enabled. By next year, 50% of all handsets will be data enabled.

 

One Japan myth – all teenagers on subways. In fact, only 7%. 20-24 year olds are 24%, and 27% are over 39. Something in it for everybody.

 

What is freedom like? Any information anywhere. Create the communities you want.

 

(Community is key – liken to Meg Whitman’s keynote. Successful Internet businesses build communities – the original interactive model of the Internet, not the traditional business model many large companies are trying to impose.)

 

Personalize the experience, particularly around messaging.

 

Communities are the base for mobile Internet.

 

Great device – Moore’s law lowers price, makes things easier to use. E,g, phone with camera.

 

“the Mom factor” – once your mother will use it, that starts to stimulate adoption.

 

Good network experience – People weren’t flocking to the Internet 10 years ago when they had unreliable 1200 or 2400 baud connections. WAP experience in GSM is similarly bad. If network experience is decent, community starts to build.

 

Word of mouth of good experience starts to build community.

 

Any community is built around communications

 

Why success in Japan and failure in Europe? Japan adopted communication as the primary role for the mobile Internet, IP and TCP standards. DoCoMo helped drive model. In Europe, they decided it’s about content. Tried to drive users to content. No community.. Bad user experience, bad network experience on GSM, no community.

 

Openwave is the technology provider that enables it – 100 million phones have shipped with their microbrowser. Sprint, Nextel, others use their technology in the mobile base. They are providing the role Netscape did in the early days of the Web.

 

Believe the circle can start in the Americas in 2002.

 

2 competing sets of standards – telephony based (SMS, MMS) and Internet based (IP, IM, email). Need to bridge the gap.

 

XHTML, SyncML are new standards for the mobile Internet.

 

RF standards –

 

More important to make interoperability the key. Open standards are absolutely necessary. IETF and others should set the standards, not corporations pushing proprietary protocols.

 

What makes it happen?

 

User device: The Model T story – single choice led to many choices, from motorcycles to trucks.

 

Tablet vs PDA vs PC – form factor battle is ridiculous for the same reasons. No need to limit it. People will vote with their dollars.

 

Communications embedded in car? Probably not for a long time.

 

Nokia Communicator – fringe devices. Real device people will use is the mobile phone.

 

Need better UI - New phones have a mouse. Moving away from a device structured only for phone calls to one that includes messaging.

 

New UI is more graphical, color.

 

73 clicks to buy a book on eBay? Not useful on traditional phone. Put in style sheets, mouse, point and click – much better.

 

 

Demo – Ron Mandel –

 

Phone that has been shipping for a year in Japan – mobile browser, local IMAP client – can read, create and attach email. Built-in DRM to prevent mailing copyrighted material.. Also has MP3 player.

 

New phone from LG Telecom, Korea – Java interface. Download game, pay once, keep it on phone as long as you want. Fighting game - decent animation on small screen.

 

Built-in camera in phone – put sound on picture-taking functions so people can’t make spy photos.

 

Sprint – Samsung I300 – fully integrated PalmOS device, color phone, color palm, 8M memory, running Openwave browser. Use stylus to navigate.

 

New Sprint PCS color phone – polyphonic ring tones, WAV files.

 

 

Network experience – 2G is great circuit network – pure telephone. GSM is a non-starter – can take up to 40 seconds to get a connection.

 

2.5G – GPRS - overlay networks – good performance, extend to audio and visual content. Jphone was 2.5G experience.

 

3G – not a prerequisite for the future of mobile Internet. 2.5G is the important thing.

 

Beginning of 2000 – 10% penetration of 2.5G. By end of 2002, 70% penetration (worldwide). 600 million people.

 

Cingular GPRS, Sprint SRTT – network experience is changing.

 

Customize the experience on your phone – combined ring tone and picture can be downloaded quickly

 

 

Messaging – key new sets of technologies being developed.

 

Count the number of mailboxes you have – voicemail, Internet, work voicemail, mobile voicemail. All messaging totally disjointed. View of open community communications. Single unified view using IM as the bridge between telephony and Internet.

 

Carrier is most important player – trusted, can bridge voice, data, mobile, fixed line. No other infrastructure in the world can do that. Openwave’s role is to provide the carriers with the technology they need to do this.

 

 

Demo – Jonathan Perrera – OPWV messaging guru.

 

Wireless IM – OpenWave IM, deployed by a carrier in their data center.

 

OpenWave 5 browser – full color, shipping in Japan.

 

Cross-device messaging support –

 

Interoperability between buddies and communities – carrier-based, SMS users

 

Typing on phones is hard – they make it easy.

 

Phone has buddy list – shows presence of each buddy. Shows whether they’re on a phone or a PC.

 

Buddy list on the PC integrates both OpenWave and MSN Messenger buddy list on the same list. Will integrate Yahoo and AOL next year.

 

QuickText – e.g “l” translates to “wanna go to lunch?” User-configurable favorite phrases.

 

IM – quicktext – on PC, type in a number of choices for where to go to lunch. Comes to phone as numbered list that allows selection.

 

Themes – can customize background (e.g. rain theme in Seattle).

 

Individual can move from phone to PC without interrupting their IM session – still has chat history from the other device.

 

All this is available today.

 

 

Future – technology prototype of new OPWV messaging client shipping in 2002:

 

Address book = buddy list. Integrates presence information, phone numbers. Can click down list, find people who are available, call them.

 

Context-sensitive buddy list – register presence based on context (home or work, for example). Can tie in multimedia IM messages – mail comes into phone, can call back in response. Can set up IM chat with the person with one click as well.

 

Group IM chats –

 

Click to conference – enable voice call among all the people involved in an IM chat.

 

 

Finale – convergence between two big environments begins now. Messaging technologies, connectivity, devices are all ready.