A panel of mobile technology experts at the DEMOfall conference on Tuesday reflected the general attitude from the CTIA Wireless IT conference in Los Angeles: mobile technology is in need of revolution.A panel of mobile technology experts at the DEMOfall conference on Tuesday reflected the general attitude from the CTIA Wireless IT conference in Los Angeles: mobile technology is in need of revolution.
The barriers to mobile phone application adoption are pretty clear: too much digital rights management (DRM) red tape, too little Web connectivity, and too few people who really know what their mobile devices can do, they said.
The panel began with a DRM discussion in which panelist Tom Jacobs, director of research for Sun Microsystems Laboratories posited that DRM too often gets a bad rap.
"DRM is certainly a party killer and it is one of the least understood areas," Jacobs said. "When you start talking about Hollywood content, there is a real concern about their ability to monetize that content that they have. There is a lot of research going on but the focus has been: 'How do you make it a worthwhile technology from the consumers' perspective and also meet the needs of the enterprise and content owners' perspective?'"
Consumers want to pay once and only once for media, whether it be music, movies, or photos, panelists said. Once they pay for that content, they want to access it with an iPod, a Zune, a desktop, a TV set, or a boom box. But Hollywood is afraid that "owning" is analogous to sharing.
"People think that DRM is about locking it all up," Jacobs said. "I like to say that we're in the first generation of rights management and things have been poorly rolled out. We need to go towards where everything goes back into the Web. Where you manage your photos and your videos should be a network service that is interoperable."
Juergen Urbanski, general manager for Wi-Fi sharing firm FON, said that people want the same portability with their rights to broadband. His company sells a small router that allows users to connect to the broadband connection in their house while they are on the go.
"FON is now the largest community of Wi-Fi users worldwide," Urbanski said. "The simple idea is if you already pay for broadband access at home, why would you have to pay for broadband access on the go?"
With the FON router, users can connect to your home broadband connection from any hot spot.
The general hope of the wireless panel was that applications would simplify the mobile phone space so that users of any generation will "get" things like text messaging and online gaming.
"Maybe your mom doesn't get text messaging but she would get it from a Web site," said Toufic Mobarak, president and chief technology officer for MobileSphere, the company that makes the Web application that sends SMS messages to any phone anywhere. "It's about making it easier for people to understand."
