| | By John Oram in California @ Thursday, March 19, 2009 4:59 PM
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| | Some of the biggest names in venture capital looked at a variety of startup wireless developers. Dow Jones Wireless innovations conference gave these developers their fifteen minutes before the likes of Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures, Blackberry Partners Fund, and Qualcomm Ventures. At the end of the day fewer than six got honorable mentions.
The venture capitalists explained what they look for in a startup. Richard Wong, a partner at Accel Partners, said that there is no “silver bullet” that will allow every application to run on all platforms. He emphasized that a developer needs to pick a market segment and one or two wireless platforms and go for it. Shawn Carolan, managing director of Menlo Ventures was asked if a start up should spend money on publicity. Carolan said spend your money on satisfying customers with an app that works. He said startups they have invested in have sometimes spent a couple of years getting their application tailored to a market segment.
Many of the presenting startups were built around social networking. Some were old fashioned business applications that helped a user fill out a form on a mobile device. One of the more promising startups was rmbrME. They took the old-fashioned business cards, converted it into a universal digital format that is deliverable to every mobile and wired device. Bruce Sachs, a partner at Charles River Ventures, said this one understands how to make money with their idea.
Keynote speakers included important wireless players like T-mobile, Texas Instruments, Virgin Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless. The wireless carriers talked about what is happening in their markets. Marcel Vieira from Texas Instruments brought its latest devices based on the OMAP 3 CPU. He claimed that power consumption for the newest Archos MID (mobile internet devices) was close to 1-Watt with super-frugal OMAP 3 CPU. Vieira said that users do not need an Intel Atom x86processor to enjoy browsing and complete their normal tasks.
Vieira said that the next generation OMAP processor will be based on 45nm technology and use even less power. Ben at UMPC Portal is carrying low power ideas much further. He is talking about the changes in our lives if we had battery power all day.
 Dan Schulman, CEO of Virgin Mobile USA, explained how they are laser focused on the youth market. He talked about the value of sponsoring Britney Spears' high profile pop music tour to reach their main target audience. He talked about the traditional publicity approach of trading tickets to Spears’ show at local radio stations for free advertising time, something many of the wireless geeks attending hadn’t heard of before. Schulman explained that was another way of leveraging Virgin Mobile’s brand name in front of their young mobile subscribers.
T-mobile’s CTO, Cole Broadman, gave an overview of their success with the HTC G1 Google Android. He said that 40 per cent of the fourth quarter sales were smartphones – mostly the Android. Broadman said they plan to double their installed 3G network by the end of 2009. That will give T-mobile 3G coverage in 135 US cities. He said that Deutsche Telekom the parent company tested 4G last fall.
ITExaminer has extensively covered T-mobile's HTC G1 Android smartphone. X
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