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Media networking is all around us. Did you get this email? It takes you here: https://wirelessit2006.bdmetrics.com/portal/EventLogin.aspx
As part of the registration process for CTIA in LA, there were three questions with a long list of check boxes. They were:

1) Your Primary Job Function
I put “corporate management”

2) Your Company’s Primary Business Focus
I put “Applications or Software Developer”

3) Your Product Interests
I put “Wireless Data, Other”

Based on this information, here are the 10 People I need to meet at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2006:

Company: Azos AI, LLC.
Job Title: Co-founder
State / Province: Virginia
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Azos AI, LLC.
Job Title: Partner
State / Province: Virginia
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: AirG Wireless Inc.
Job Title: VP Corporate Development
State / Province: British Columbia
Country: Canada
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Drop In Media, LLC
Job Title: Co-Founder
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Xtract Ltd
Job Title: President & Chairman
State / Province:
Country: Finland
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: THQ
Job Title:
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Ontela, Inc
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: Washington
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Transclick
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: New York
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Lower Mars, LLC.
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Google
Job Title: Strategic Partnerships - Mobile
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Really? Are those the 10 people I NEED to meet? I mean, I MAY like to meet these nine companies, (why is Azos listed twice?) but if you asked me to create my own list of 10 People I need to meet at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2006, it would not include these companies.

Not to impugn the fine product that BD Metrics the company powering the “You-Based” tradeshow experience for CTIA, but I am having a hard time increasing relevance with this tool.

I clicked on the “Improve your matches” button and it took me to the “3 questions” screen again. I clicked a few more boxes:

For Company business focus, I put:
• Applications or Software Developer
• ASP - Applications Service Provider
• Content Provider or Aggregator

…and for product interests, I put:
• Mobile Entertainment
• Wireless Content
• Wireless Data, Other
• Wireless Email / Internet
• Wireless Services

Here is the new list of 10 people I need to meet:

Company: digitalVanity Software
Job Title: MD
State / Province:
Country: Germany
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: AirG Wireless Inc.
Job Title: VP Corporate Development
State / Province: British Columbia
Country: Canada
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Waat Media Wireless Entertainment
Job Title: Managing Director
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Feedtext Inc.
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: iambic, Inc.
Job Title: COO
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Sony PIctures Digital Entertainment
Job Title: Vice President, Production
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Breakpoint
Job Title: CEO
State / Province:
Country: Poland
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Digital Ignite
Job Title:
State / Province: Virginia
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment
Job Title:
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

Company: rocket science
Job Title: chief scientist
State / Province:
Country: United Kingdom
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan

I still do not think I need to meet any of these people, though, if you are on either of these lists and feel otherwise, I would be happy to meet. And maybe that is the value of the system – these are companies that I really do need to meet but just don’t know it yet. That would be great, but given the manner in which the recommendations are derived, I have a hard time believing that. This tool does not capture basic necessary information to be useful such as whether I am buying or selling, specificity of intent, descriptive information, or any other qualifying details.

It does have a fairly useful search facility, though, that in concept would enable you to reach out to people without knowing their email address. I searched for “Verizon” and got a list of 63 people, most of which are Verizon Wireless employees. The tool lists title and company. I sent a message to “President and CEO from Verizon Wireless” suggesting we grab a beer and chat, but have not heard back yet. I wonder why that is. Dennis - let’s grab a beer and chat. I am free on Wednesday afternoon.

Is the President and CEO of Verizon Wireless likely to use such a tool to plan his schedule at CTIA? This brings me to the real problem here that, if solved, will unlock untold value to the tradeshow industry: How do you effectively filter the introductions so that Dennis Strigl trusts the tool as a value-added must-have and not just a spam generator?

The competition is always among sellers. There are always more people who want to sell than there are who want to buy. This means that Verizon Wireless gets inundated by too many requests to meet by companies that are not qualified in any way. They are drinking from a fire hose and need a way to decrease the flow by effectively filtering out the companies that are just noise to them so that the companies with real value get the attention they deserve. On the other side of this equation are companies looking to be “pre-qualified” so that they can get noticed.

My point is that the concept is awesome: Adding efficiency to the primary purpose of tradeshows. If BD Metrics can evolve their offering to truly deliver on that vision, they should easily be worth a billion dollars. Everybody goes to trade shows to meet other people in the industry, but it is in fact a very inefficient process for meeting people unless you already know them, in which case the only real value of a tradeshow is that it reduces the friction of meeting in person since everyone is already in the same physical location.

BD Metrics should do a deal with LinkedIn. Take the familiar LinkedIn concept, then assign a temporary attribute to yourself driven by registration called “at CTIA” and specify the dates. Then add desired objectives and visibility into companies by type and name.

Or failing that, make the tool more usable.

Ask me:
- The name of and category or type of company I work at

- What I am selling or buying by category and freeform description, which gets indexed

- What 10 companies I would like to meet and for what purpose, which leads to derivative intelligence: “if you want to meet Company A, you will really want to meet Company B, too”

Then derive intelligence from what you already know about every company and inform the matches, but also let me specify companies I know I want to meet. Then learn from it. Watch the patterns, make it smarter over time.

Set up an invitation-based introduction system to allow me to filter meeting requests, like Evite.

Then allow me to publish a calendar showing time availability. Maybe I reserved a room and people can meet me there. Let me specify that.

Given the specific location-based nature of a tradeshow, I would be in favor of a more fluid mobile application, too. It would show availability in real time with a simple messaging component to facilitate communication.

This is a great example of a verticalized LMNO that would be a hugely useful business tool.

Come to think of it, our platform could easily enable this. Come to think of it, one company that should be on my top 10 list is BD Metrics. How come they didn’t show up?

I am sitting in a hotel room right now, having just awakened to the pleasant wake up song I put on my Nokia N90 phone. But as you know, one of the basic tenets of the LMNO construct is that mobile phones are not really mobile phones anymore – they are connected media networking devices. Or more to the point, media networking is the new communication construct, and the “device formerly known as the mobile phone” is a device that is enabling this new communication construct. There is a long chain of value being built now to deliver the full value of this evolved communication, and one link is the device. We will see converged devices, like my N90, that is a phone, but also a text messaging device, camcorder, calendar and, given it’s 1.0 weight and size, doorstop or, in a pinch, bludgeoning weapon. We will also see verticalized devices like Danger’s HipTop (SideKick) which is so optimized for instant messaging that few people use it for much more.

Then there is Chumby, which falls well outside of the realm of devices that I had been considering likely to enable the LMNO communication revolution.

Let me step back for a moment and ask you about consumer electronic devices. There are certain categories that have not been refreshed for decades:
- the blender
- the calculator
- the digital clock

Ok, the blender is not exactly a consumer electronic, but I mention it to illustrate that the basic design is nearly perfect: It needn’t do anything more than blend. How do you improve it? The only way is industrial design, capacity and maybe the size of the motor. Other than that, when it does what it is supposed to do, the consumer is satisfied. Adding wifi to it doesn’t improve it.

Basic calculators are practically free now. Yes, you can buy graphing calculator to help with your calculus and trig, but I mean the basic adding machine that AP clerks everywhere still use. It adds, it subtracts, it multiplies and divides. Adding wifi to it doesn’t improve it.

What about the digital clock? I am looking at the one next to the bed right now. I didn’t even bother trying to set its alarm for this morning, and I never bother to use its big innovation, the radio. This one is a Sony, it has red numbers. This is the most tired of all consumer electronic categories. It is useful, but only to confirm information that I already have on my watch and my cell phone, both of which are more fault-tolerant than an electric clock if the power goes out. This particular application, the hotel room clock, annoys me the most, because there is information that I actually need while traveling, and can’t someone replace that clock with a device that provides that information? Rather than 6:18am, shouldn’t it tell me the weather and the traffic conditions on the route to my important meeting? How about showing my news alerts for the company I am going to meet so that when I get there I can intelligently discuss their big announcement today or the fact that they are being probed for irregular stock option grant practices?

My point is that this is a category of consumer electronics that could be massively improved and updated. Let’s add wifi to the digital clock. Then let’s make it display cool and useful information. And let’s make it open and easy to build widgets for, empowering millions of Flash developers to publish applets. Let’s even make it hackable, like a vanilla platform, the many purposes of which we have not yet contemplated.

When Steve Tomlin, an investor in Intercasting Corp, described Chumby to me six months ago and asked me how I would describe it, I immediately thought of the digital clock. “This is like a digital clock on steroids,” I said, because it is as simple to use as a clock, but built for today’s technological environment.

It is also “anti-tech” in that the industrial design is more like a beanie baby than a digital clock or a small computer. I like that even the skin is customizable.

It is sort of a soft-sided teletubby with an LCD screen and a wifi radio inside to which you can push information RSS-style. If RSS is a transport mechanism, Chumby is a termination point. Someone built a widget that syncs to a time server, so there’s your digital clock. It can also show local weather or traffic conditions. Add news alerts if you want. We are building a little Rabble widget just because. Why not stream audio and video, too? And why not put one in the kitchen as your recipe server rather than spilling soup on your laptop again? (Yes, I did.)

Now the fun part: Why not build a network of Chumbys that are all location-aware based on their IP addresses? Hack an upstream temperature transmitter into them that does nothing more than transmit micro-weather in locations not covered by major weather stations and then make the aggregate information available to whomever wants it. The weather report said it is raining in Chicago, but what about specifically in Bucktown, right now?

Anyway, check it out. This is the kind of special-purpose device that just makes perfect sense in the media networked world.

I just wanted to give a quick plug for Digital Hollywood’s Building Blocks at the San Jose Marriott this week. From the site:

“Building Blocks 2006 is the Premier Event for Transforming Entertainment, Communication Technologies & the Global Communications Network: TV, Cable, Telco, Consumer Electronics, Mobile, Broadband, Search & Email, VoIP, RSS, Blogs and Websites.”

I mention it here in the LMNO category because there is a pretty big focus on user-generated content and mobility.

Some interesting panels:

- User Generated Content: An Internet, Communications and Advertising Transformation

- Web 2.0 - The Next Iteration: How Next Generation Personalized Media is Rewiring the Web

- Social Networking in Mobile: Content, Communications and Monetizing (I am on this panel)

- Strategies in Wireless Devices and Services - from Audio & Video to Downloads: How Innovation Drives Avenues for Subscriber and Revenue Expansion

- Alternative Media & Advertising: Personalized Consumer Broadband, RSS Feeds, Blogging and Podcasting

- The Craigslist Effect: Transforming a Web-based Communications Relationship into a Commercial Personalized Information, Publishing and Advertising Enterprise

That last one looks really good.

Anyway, if you are in Silicon Valley, maybe take a look at the agenda and see if it might be worth a day. There are some interesting companies giving product demos too. Victor Harwood always puts on a targeted and useful show, and this one looks like it is going to be great.