Enterprise Ireland’s Wireless Advisory Group Attending CTIA Talks about the Challenges and Opportunities for the Year Ahead.

In the lead up to CTIA, the Wireless Advisory Group, from Enterprise Ireland’s Global Panel of Advisors talked to us about what they predict for market in the year ahead.

Stuart Bishop, Quantum Business Consulting, Inc. sees that the trend for rich media will dominate 2009 with wired, wireless media and entertainment going 100% rich media. He commented: “No longer are we looking at legacy static pictures or textual content. On-demand streamed video and audio will replace this. Core to on-demand streaming will be the removal of digital rights management, due to the inherent nature of streamed content never being locally stored. End users will use any mobile device with a browser to get the rich content, no large media storage cards will be required. 3/4G networks allow a higher bandwidth across the mobile spectrum - now the applications are starting to leverage it, and offer the consumer a true media model for their mobile devices.”

Tim Danford, Storm Ventures predicts that 2009 will be an incredibly difficult year for the entire ecosystem because large companies will dramatically cut budgets and small companies will have an incredibly hard time finding revenue. But, in the face of this he sees a bright side. He says, “ Despite the downturn, now is the time to invest in early stage innovation, many later startups will run out of money and not be viable when the market turns. When the large companies sort through their balance sheets and begin to see opportunity, they will need to acquire to expand into new markets or increase their market share.

The bright spot in the ecosystem will be the uptake of smartphones. We should look to the ripple effect this will have on network traffic, applications, content and advertising. The next battleground will be the collision of smartphones and netbooks in developed and developing economies. Device, OS, application, content and service innovation will meet robust demand for the next two years and beyond. On these more intelligent, highly networked and open devices new winners and losers will be defined.

On a personal note, I’m interested in exploring innovative ideas that will enable the next one billion consumers to experience the Internet; their experience with the Internet will likely only be through a wireless device. I’m enamored with the Kindle model, a highly capable connected device, with the complexities and expense of wireless networking ‘buried’ in the cost of the device and the content.

The future of LTE looks bright, but I believe at least a decade away before we see wide spread deployment, so we’ll all have to live with 3G for a while. On the leading edge of the curve, I continue to think about the uses of millimeter wave technologies beyond point-to-point high capacity links.”

So, what should companies concentrate on? Tim says “the enterprise is going to have to figure out mobile, mobility, what that means to their business and most importantly where do they go from here?”