BELL CONSULTING GROUP INC.

AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford Tech Startup Entrepreneurship

The panelists were:

    Anthony Lewis, VP Open Development, Verizon Wireless
    Rich Miner, VP Mobile, Google
    Matt Murphy, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
    Mark Rolston, Chief Creative Officer, Frog Design
    David Rivas, VP, Strategy & Business Dev, Software Platforms, Nokia

From the operators' perspective, the moderator asked "what will keep this from becoming a chaotic, fragmented, non-interoperable mess?" 

Lewis made a strong case that Verizon really is intending to go completely open.  Verizon's committment to the idea of opening their network has been a point which has been open to debate and is still somewhat suspect in the telecom industry.  He did roll out the Carterphone-era logic that "all devices will have to be certified by Verizon to insure they don't do harm to the network". No one knows what the certification will really entail yet; Verizon of course claims it will be a straightforward and equitable testing process.

Zawel changed the topic to new and/or recently controversial mobile device operating systems: iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry, etc.  Rich Miner corrected reports in the press about delays in the Google Android initiative, saying the plan has been all along to ship devices in the 2nd half of 2008, and that there has been no schedule slip in the program.  He contrasted "one-off Linux mobile platforms" which are not an entire mobile phone stack - middleware, libraries, app programming framework, core apps, ecosystem, large 3rd party development community, etc which constitute Android. Google has invited and signed up IC manufacturers, carriers, handset manufacturers into the Android open mobile initiative.

Rich Rolston (Frog Design) played the constructive skeptic, challenging now Google much control Google may have over Android two years from now; how many versions of Android will there be?  Google expects there to be one open source version of Android maintained; which is consistent with other open source initiatives. They expect different form factors, core applications, UI layers, etc; this was met by skepticism by Rolsten, who should probably should be expected to take a pro-Apple point of view.   He did go out of his way to praise the excellence of the Google development toolkit for Android, along with Apple's SDK.

Miner took some deserved ribbing for seeing the iPhone as an "open" platform.  The iPhone can only be purchased from Apple or it's carrier partners; and the sale of applications is tightly controlled by Apple through it's applications store.   Google seems to see Android as in effect, enabling an army of "direct to consumer" application companies.

I could blog on and on about this panel... contact Bell Consulting Group (contact page/form) if you have questions about any particular aspect.