It is quite a surprise that both these events are happening at the same time in Hong Kong. They seem a bit too desperate to draw tourists to this destination. But seriously, it’s the best to have both 3G World Congress & Mobility MarketPlace 2006 and ITU Telecom World 2006 to be in the same place! Reaping both sides of the best worlds of meeting people, networking, and also experiencing the future of technology.It is to my surprise that the adoptation of media streaming is slow in Japan. The reason that I’ve gathered seems to be mainly due to the implementations of the 3G network in mobile phones. According to the representatives of NTT DoCoMo, there are less than 200,000 subscribers on mobile tv and music streaming. It is in a way acceptable due to the lack of mobile handsets that are compatible. May well be only for DoCoMo, but realise this, DoCoMo is the predominant mobile operator in Japan. They are releasing more handset models by next year, so I think we should be expecting at least a conservative 20% increase per month, that’ll be nice. Access, a software mobile provider, affirms that Japan has not been adopting very well with mobile media simply because of the lack of applications and providers. Strange isn’t it? For me it is. I would have expected Japan to have been doing very well with media mobility at least a year ago.

Interestingly, South Korea has been doing very well. With over 3 million subscribers within a year, they are pushing very strongly forward with a range of mobile tv devices, including a USB antenna which you can use for your laptop or PC. Reason? The Government is backing it all up – Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. I think I’ve spent the most time with them overall, discussing about the future and its technical aspects of technology. I hope to keep in close contact with ETRI because we believe they can play a key role for MuSMo’s success, which is great.

Talking to the people at the exhibition really opened up my eyes further as to the direction to which MuSMo should go. It confirms our ideas and thoughts, as well as putting things in a realistic direction. However, there’s still one major obstacle ahead of us, which is the development of the core web application. I have yet to find anyone who would work closely with me on this gigantic project.