Jobs, Jobs and More Jobs!

Jason Lackey

Last weekend I blogged about how fortunate we are here at InnoPath to be working in wireless during one of the most exciting times the industry has ever had. This still is true most of the way through the week, although we still have a bunch of things to do before CTIA. By the way, if you are going to be at CTIA, let me invite you to drop by our booth, we will be there at Booth 3749 with a professional barista, some cool ActiveCare demos including stuff on Android and RIM and you can even drop off a resume or talk to us about working at InnoPath.

Anyway, on the subject of fortune, I just posted another job, this one for a Senior Director of Sales for CALA. Know a motivated closer with high level telco contacts? Send 'em our way!

Right now we have a total of 9 positions posted, with more to come. We are busy and we need good people. Check out the jobs page and see if there is a good match. Even if you don't see an exact match, but you do have relevant experience, either technical or business, go ahead and send in your resume. We are always looking for good talent.

Hope to see you at the show!

Citius, Altius, Fortius - The Service Provider Olympics!

While the end of the party in Vancouver brought a tear to some otherwise dry eyes here at InnoPath, it also inspired a bit of thought with regard to a kind of competition we all enjoy and benefit from that doesn't require scary fast bobsled runs or foggy ski courses to hold - competition between the mobile operators.

Dave Ginsburg has put some thoughts to paper with regards to Gold, Silver, Bronze and DNFs in the Mobile Operator Olympics in a story available on TMCnet.

Citius, Altius, Fortius!

Right Here, Right Now

Jason Lackey

"Anyone working in the mobile and wireless industry is fortunate." - Dr. J. Gerry Purdy

Way back in 1990, inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the British pop band Jesus Jones released the single "Right here, right now" (snippet here), a tune which captured well the zeitgeist in Europe with the end of the cold war, a magical time. I will never forget sharing cigarettes with some of the East German guards through holes in the wall as a college student on vacation and how blessed and fortunate many of us felt to be sharing smokes instead of burning on an atomic funeral pyre, which for a while had seemed a likely outcome.

Fast forward through 9/11, a recession, a housing bubble, global financial crisis and the whole bright shining future as seen in Wired Magazine of the mid 90's seems for many a dim and tarnished dream and reality is starting to look more like some sort of cyberpunk dystopia.

Except not everywhere.

As an example, Friday was bonus day at InnoPath. Sure, everyone is working hard and sure we are doing more with less but this does not diminish the fact that while so many are still getting pink slips and San Francisco is dolling out 15,000 pay cuts, it was bonus day at InnoPath and a year of blood, sweat and tears was recognized in a very real way at one company in Silicon Valley.

Dr. Gerry Purdy pretty much summed it up with his quote - we are fortunate to be in wireless, particularly right now. While construction, commercial real estate and the automobile industry suffer a holocaust of near biblical proportions, we are dealing with customers who are growing faster than they thought and who are scrambling to build enough capacity. While some are shuttering factories, we are going to be hiring another 30-40 people over the next year or so. Speaking of which, if you or anyone you know are interested in working in the wireless industry, please visit our jobs page, here. Maybe your dream job is there, but even if you don't see an immediate match, if you know people with experience in the industry encourage them to send in their resumes.

Time to go play with phones now...will it be the Nexus One or Tilt2? Hmmm....maybe both!

CLIQs to Bricks and Bricks to CLIQs

Jason Lackey

One of my favorite device blogs, the Boy Genius Report, today reported that something seems to have gone wrong with the latest round of OTA updates for the CLIQ where CLIQs are getting bricked.

Oops!

Some things, like OTA updates, may seem fairly simple, almost technical slamdunks. However, once you start peeling back the onion, you will find that things are not nearly as simple as they might appear.

When we work with and OEM, we do extensive testing, not only of the client/server delivery mechanism, but also of the packages as well. The overall system must work end-to-end in order for it to be considered successful. Fortunately we have a world class team of device engineers at InnoPath. This fact was hammered home for me a few months back when we were up the peninsula doing some demos for a device maker and our device team made some observations with regards to how a new device was being built and made some suggestions to a large OEM about how they could improve their device. I was a bit shocked, but the guys at the OEM looked at each other, nodded, and said that there had been some internal debate, with the more clueful side recommending the InnoPath approach.

Anyway, testing and careful coordination between the concerned parties is one thing, building in failsafe is another. This is why, starting with our 5.6 Embedded FOTA client, we include the ability to back out of an update on the device, that way even if things go horribly horribly wrong, the worst that happens is you lose a few minutes time and end up no worse than you were when things started, which is a lot better than having a brick in your pocket!

The Mobile Data Challenge

Jason Lackey

We all know that voice revenues are withering and service providers are looking to replace that lost revenue or at least slow down the bleeding. Ringtones and themes clearly are not going to do it, but what will? Data?

InnoPath sponsored a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Mobile Data Challenge, which contains analysis and results of a survey of nearly 200 C-Level telco execs from across the world, NAM, APAC and EMEA.

I encourage you to get your copy today.

Here's the link.

iPhone, Android, RIM and Symbian, Oh My!

Jason Lackey


We are coming right up on time for the GSMA Mobile World Congress, this year again in beautiful Barcelona, Spain. Some things are certain at Mobile World Congress, ham sandwiches at the Fira, big crowds for the colorful performances at the Cboss stand and new product announcements from just about everyone.

This year, we actually have something pretty big. We are announcing Universal Smartphone support with Android, Symbian, Windows phone, RIM and iPhone support all baked in to the latest and greatest version of InnoPath ActiveCare.

For the consumer, this means that OTA activation, updates and customer support are all available regardless of what kind of smartphone the subscriber has. For the operator, it means that the goodness of ActiveCare is now available for the entire spectrum of smartphones, making silo solutions a problem of the past.

But wait, there's more!

It gets even better, because we conspired with the Economist's EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) to bring you a nice study of Tier 1 Service Providers, The Mobile Data Challenge. To top things off, we are even doing a webinar with EIU's Katherine Abreu on Wednesday, 10 February at 15:00 GMT/ 10:00 Eastern / 7:00 Pacific.

Anyway, exciting times here at InnoPath, but time for me to go set up all the new demos. Best thing is, wider coverage means that I get more toys!

Hope to see you in Barcelona! We will be in Hall 1 at Stand 1F39.

InnoPath Android Support

Jason Lackey

At InnoPath we are very fortunate to be at the center of an exciting industry. Didn't used to be that way, Silicon Valley was a bit of a backwater for wireless for a long time, but with the Rise of Android, the coming of the iPhone and the advent the the pretty but perhaps doomed WebOS, Sunnyvale, where our office is, more or less between Mountain View and Cupertino, is now pretty central.

The whole Android thing has been amazing and looks to be picking up steam. To be honest, it was, despite warts and flaws, hard for them to pry the Nexus One out of my greedy paws. Can't really say that for the Tilt2 nor the Blackberry 9700 that have recently crossed my path, although I will admit that WinMo 6.5 Exchange support still beats the hell out of anything out of the Googleplex so far. C'mon guys, add the calendar!

Anyway, Google the precocious child is eagerly repeating all of the mistakes the mobile industry
has made over the past 20 years or so (forgot who said this first, but that person is dead on) and downplaying the importance of support and looking at a $500+ smartphone like it was some freeware Linux hack distro where the most you can hope for is some action on the support forums is a huge blunder - particularly when you ship killer hardware that appears to be running beta software.

That said, perhaps it is useful to sometimes have a counterpoint to the relatively high levels of support that are usually seen in mobile, with devices like the Motorola Droid on Verizon being the polar opposite of the Nexus One - well supported, details sweated out, refined and relatively polished in comparison, with world class customer care backing you up.

Anyway, we did a PR on support and new phones that InnoPath is shipping on, which can be found here: http://innopath.com/news/press_releases/2010/2010_02_02_innopath_supports_customers_when_google_and_nexus_one_dont.shtml