Friday, October 17, 2008

How I See It

A regional summit on the next hot technology sector

Next time you update your Facebook status on your mobile phone (or watch your teenager do it), consider this: It’s just the beginning of how the “cell phone” industry is changing, and what an enormous economic opportunity it presents.

The mobile industry is now hitting one of those inflection points, where a combination of network technology upgrades and device advances is making the mobile device a real Internet device. Move over desktops and laptops: The handheld web is here.

That shift presents Massachusetts with an enormous opportunity. According to Rutberg and Co., a wireless investment and research firm, more than $1 billion has been invested in Bay State wireless startups since 2006.

We’ve planted the seeds of something big. But the competition is fierce. So, just as we have in the life sciences and clean tech sectors, we need to foster the right environment for growth. That’s why next week’s New England Mobile Summit, the brainchild of veteran industry consultant Mark Lowenstein and his Mobile Ecosytem group and sponsored by the Massachusetts Network Communications Council (among others), is so important. The summit, being held in conjunction with Mobile Internet World on Oct. 22 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, will bring together all the key players into one room to discuss what we need to do to bolster our nascent ecosystem.

The New England Summit, a conference within the larger Mobile Internet World conference, is a first-ever attempt to put key local wireless players in one room and ask the question: Can we continue to compete amid intense competition from not only Silicon Valley but Southern California, Scandinavia, China and India?

On first blush, the answer seems to be an emphatic, “Yes.” The billion dollars in investment we’ve seen in recent years has been doled out to a range of companies, from the geeky (infrastructure builders) to the cool (application companies), but they all add up to one thing: another cluster of potential growth for Massachusetts.

Starent Networks Corp. and Airvana Inc., two companies that provide network tools for delivering multimedia and other content, have done so well that they successfully launched IPOs last year, a difficult year on Wall Street. Another company with bright future, Cambridge-based Vanu Inc., has created software that allows systems using differing technical standards to speak to one another and add capacity.

The application side is even more robust. Needham-based Mobicious Inc. publishes a directory of mobile-phone applications, but also has recently launched its own camera phone application called SnapMyLife that allows you to post your photos to a Flickr-like platform. Vlingo Corp. of Cambridge translates your voice into text, making your handset easier to use, and uLocate Communications Inc. provides location-based services that enable you to locate friends or find places to eat and shop.

We’ve planted seeds. But we also face fierce competition. So we need to keep nurturing the growth by keeping and attracting talent, integrating university research and development (both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and MIT have small but growing wireless centers) with private-sector initiatives, using the state government to help us market the state’s expertise — to ourselves and to the outside world. The summit is a vital first step.

Does one meeting in a convention hall make a region a world leader in a technology? Obviously not. But it’s a good first step in starting the conversation. It’s up to all of us — the tech sector, the universities, and the state government — to turn talk into action.

 

Mark Horan is executive director of the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, representing over 200 wireless, video, and network communications firms. He can be reached at mhoran@massnetcomms.org.