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CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment Brings Cell Phone Community to San Francisco

Oct 22 2007
By Yardena Arar

San Francisco is cell phone central for the next three days as the CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment show comes to Moscone Center… And more and more we’re also seeing innovative services that leverage the ever-increasing network speeds and handset computing power. 

Community is becoming a big deal—or at least trying to. Just recently, for example, I saw an intriguing demo from a company called Zannel that lets you easily share text, images, and videos with friends and/or the world at large. It has elements of Facebook, Twitter, and/or Pownce. Its selling point is its seemingly effortless cross-platform versatility. If I send an image using Zannel, it appears in seconds on a Web page or blog (there’s even a Zannel widget you can put in your own blog to help people keep up with your messages, images, and videos).  It’s dazzling technology. Will I use it? I don’t know. My problem is that I have limited bandwidth for all the community options out there. What about you? 

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But while the mobile universe may be suffering from community overload, there’s never too much bandwidth. Sprint’s approaching launch of its Wimax service will be very much on people’s minds: Will Wimax enable mobile TV? And how is Verizon’s new MediaFlo-based TV service doing anyway? We’ll expect more content announcements for all manner of mobile TV, even though I’ve yet to see people glued to their cell phones for video.  I’m also going to be looking for GPS-related news. Location-based services (that’s LBS in industry-speak) continue to be a next big thing in cell phones.  Finally, I see no sign yet of iPhone news, but you can be sure Apple’s blockbuster handset will also be on people’s minds.  It’s going to be a busy few days, starting with a pre-show press even this evening. I’ll be filing as time permits. Stay tuned.



Source

PC World