Enterprise Ireland's Wireless Advisory Group attending CTIA Predicts the Hot Technologies for 2009

From Enterprise Ireland's Global Panel of Advisors, the Wireless Advisory Group attending CTIA give their views on what's hot for the telecom's market this year. The predictions bode well for Irish companies attending CTIA, who have many innovations and existing technologies for these markets.

Don O' Brien from Dontel Consulting predicts that in 2009, operators will focus on opportunities to grow new value-added services (VAS) revenues while reducing OPEX and service costs. He said; "new advertising services such search and display will launch with operators in North America. But I believe, that it will take time before the operators or the VAS partners will be able to monetize the service, create workable business models or realize any scale or scope."

Don also sees that forecasts for advertising revenues are very optimistic. "U.S. mobile advertising revenues for search and display will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013, from $160 million in 2008, this represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 81.2 percent, according to The Kelsey Group," he commented. "Similarly, Ovum, Yankee, Jupiter Research and eMarketer forecasts for US mobile advertising range from $1.3 to $4.7 billion by 2011. From my perspective, I expect that the revenues will take longer to materialize."

Seamus McAteer sees that the telecom market will be one of the healthiest sectors in 2009, but will still be impacted by the global economic downturn. Seamus commented: "Global mobile operators will continue to invest aggressively to capture growth in developing markets most notably Brazil, India and China. In the mature U.S. mobile market, prepaid and other contractless services will grow as cash strapped and credit challenged consumers trade down. Innovation in mobile services has now moved from the network to the client with the proliferation of handsets using open operating systems and built in GPS.

Added to this, a growing number of operators will decide to cede the role of media aggregator and rediscover the benefits of owning a quality dumb pipe. To succeed, companies will no longer seek to address billions of mobile subscribers and instead will position themselves to deliver compelling services to narrowly defined segments defined by factors such as handset technologies, operator or monthly spend."