I am looking forward to attending the Pacific Northwest Wireless Summit in Vancouver on Monday. It looks like the organizers have put together a good program. Getting to visit one of my favorite cities is a bonus.
I will be on a panel discussing the impact of the iPhone on wireless carriers, a topic I’ve written about here and here. And it’s a topic of real importance to Fonolo because we have our own iPhone app (which is not available yet on AppStore, but you can see it here).
The most remarkable thing about iPhone, in my opinion, has been the eye popping numbers generated by the AppStore. In its first six months, 300 million apps were downloaded. There are now over 10,000 apps on the store. [UPDATE: It’s now 500m downloads, and 15,000 apps.] Here’s something I read yesterday that really captures some of the excitement. It’s a letter from start-up Tapulous, makers of several casual games for the iPhone, to their investors, which got leaked and reprinted by the scoundrels at TechCrunch.
Holy cow. In late December, on one crazy day, we added 200,000 (!) new users to Tap Tap Revenge. When we started the company, our fundamental bet was that the iPhone was going to be different, and truly ring in the mobile decade. The first decade was about the PC revolution, the second decade was about the network, and the third decade, we believed, would be about mobile computing. It’s happening alright. The iPhone, with the new price points, is a huge hit, and the App Store has been a success beyond anyone’s dreams. When we started the company, people asked us why we didn’t focus on SMS and WAP, and some rolled their eyes when we told them our goal was to get to 1 million users in 18 months. Six months after launch, we’re at 5 million users. This technology is disruptive, and that means big new companies will be created.
You can read the whole thing here.
While at the Summit, I will also be participating in their Wireless Investment Forum which is run in conjunction with the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley. This event is what people generally call a “beauty pageant” where each start-up gets 10 minutes on stage before a panel of investors. What’s got me excited about this one is that the investors are all from the telecom space and in some cases are the venture arms of carrier’s themselves. This means I don’t have to do a lot of background and can use my time to get right to juicy parts about why Fonolo is a natural fit for carrier partnership. You can read more about that here (along with a 2 minute video.)
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