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| Innovating The Next Big Thing | September 6, 2010 |  |
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UIEvolution on Wireless Evolution: Wireless Network Innovation Enables an Evolving Mobile Experience
May 1, 2008 – A profile of Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution
While working with MySpace, one of UIEvolution’s partners, Ruff noted his company has closely observed “end user interaction in a personal way with services like social networking” and while these network interactions are “very much in their infancy,” he has found that a “lot of people are prognosticating” about social networking trends and their potentially dramatic impact on the mobile space. “What we see coming,” explained Ruff, “as these wireless networks get rolled out, I think we will see them touch peoples lives beyond mobile phones in the very near future.” For instance, he pointed to “the way AT&T is working with Starbucks – to promote another kind of wireless connectivity.” Ruff sees "all sorts of innovation coming in terms of mobile access to networks and services.”
On the Road
For instance, “another push” that UIEvolution has been active in is “wireless services to the automobile” -- something Ruff expects to really take off “once we have 3G and 4G networks,” which will transform the car into something of a mobile device cum access point. Added Ruff, “we sometimes joke the car is a $40,000 cell phone!”
But it’s really no joke: as next generation networks proliferate, Ruff expects numerous wireless solutions tailor-made for the car will become compelling. But for widespread car-based web services to become a reality requires “getting networks up to 3G plus,” and Ruff noted “we’re beginning to get that kind of capability on our wireless networks – from a wireless standpoint, we’ll have an ubiquitous network in place,” so now “may be a great time to start working on it. We see a great deal of interest in the auto industry for network based services.”
UIEvolution’s experience, he believes, makes the company “uniquely positioned to help deliver the connected car to the market.”
IPTV
Another big trend from the operator perspective is what Ruff calls the “multi-screen vision,” which may be a three oreven a four screen vision. In Japan, where UIEvolution is pioneering IPTV solutions over wireless networks, Ruff noted that his company has developed an IPTV market subsidiary with NTT communications which powers a service for on demand TV in Japan. “We see migration of multi-screen content in the next several years and we think it’s a good time to start thinking about those investments and help our customers – wireless providers, network providers and media companies – exploit these new opportunities.”
Ruff recalled that UIEvolution’s “relationship with IPTV dates back about a year and half” and noted “IPTV is in its early stages worldwide in terms of usage, coverage and information.” But he added, “We think its going to accelerate very fast.” As Ruff pointed out, there is already “a lot of connectivity in the home today – the backbone is there,” and what will develop next is “the user experience in connecting to both local media and media that you find on the Internet to create an all-encompassing experience.” He expects that the “challenges won’t be like in the early days” when the chokepoint was the “speed of the network,” but rather “device constraints, limitations of remote control, and mental constraints.”
For instance, Ruff explained that “if you look at the behavior of TV, it is a passive behavior, not an active one. I don’t know if I’d call it a boob-tube like we joked in the 80s, but television is still perceived primarily as a passive act: you receive data, not interact with it. The question is: how do you take a passive device like TV, which is really simple to use, and connect it to the worlds of social networking services to create a unique product for the end user?” Added Ruff: “These kinds of questions offer great opportunities for UIEvolution.”
Japan’s Gadget-Accepting Culture
Ruff has found that the United States is “not as aggressive in the IPTV market” in comparison to parts of Asia, such as Japan where they’re now “little bit ahead.” When UIEvolution set up its IPTV shop in Japan two years ago, IPTV was still a “really nascent market in the U.S.” Starting off in Japan where the market was more developed made sense, especially as UIEvolution has “been doing business in Japan for the life of the company.” Ruff noted that the company’s founder is from Japan, and added that UIEvolution has found a more “gadget-accepting, CE-accepting consumer market in Japan,” where consumers are “willing to try more things faster than we see in other markets in the world. Their trying is really the laboratory we all need to build these great services.”
Ruff is optimistic about the future of IPTV and UIEvolution’s role in helping to bring opportunities to other markets, including the U.S.He noted that, “for the last two years, we’ve been able to work in IPTV while others are just talking about it. Hopefully we’re several steps ahead of the competition by having had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes that others haven’t yet had the chance to make!”
For instance, Ruff noted the rise in “navigation products that we’re seeing in cars and portable devices,” and observed that “in the Japanese market, it’s pretty saturated already – as they’ve had navigation systems for at least a couple of years ahead of the curve here in the U.S. market.” He believes “that this does play into the desire to have an extra gadget in their lives and to try it out,” adding that “Japan is a great place to introduce and learn on these new devices and technologies, then the market in the U.S. definitely catches up – and the size difference of the U.S. market makes it bigger over time.”
Geography and Market Opportunities, Challenges
One reason for the slower development time for the wireless market in the U.S. is the broad expanse of the North American continent with its relatively sparsely populated interior compared to the densely populated nations of Northeast Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea. “With respect to wireless in general, we contend it is a much easier engineering problem to get a wireless network to cover millions and millions of people in a smaller area than a high speed network in Iowa or Montana. To build a ubiquitous network here is a much bigger challenge.We are fortunate that wireless operators make those investments, and continue to build those networks – it isn’t cheap in a geographic area this widespread.” Looking back on the early years of the Internet, Ruff commented, “Think about when the Internet took off – dial-up was a relatively easy technology to get massively deployed to get people going, and the U.S. dial-up consumer had more Internet users as a percentage of the population than most places in world. In places like Japan and Korea, broadband accelerated much more quickly,” owing to the “ability to get those faster networks to the home,” facilitated by their smaller geographical areas and more densely populated urban centers. “The physical still plays out in the information world we live in,” observed Ruff.
Looking to future opportunities in Asia, Ruff noted that China presents a new but challenging opportunity, as it’s “size is different” and this affects both the “opportunity and cost – and makes it different from Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea.” In some ways the China market is reminiscent of the U.S. market with its continental expanse and vast rural spaces between cities.
But for the moment, UIEvolution is keeping its eye on the more imminent market opportunities in Japan and Korea: “For us specifically, we’re staying really focused right now – it’s a strategic business decision– we don’t think we can execute well by serving our North American and Japanese customers while also opening up another business experience in China.” As Ruff explained, “When you think about wireless, and the world of connected wireless devices, that’s a pretty big market where we can add significant value.We intend to stay pretty focused on helping our customers here in North America and expanding to Japan, and then we’ll look at Europe and China when it’s right for us to look at those markets.” Also in the future is the intriguing India market, which Ruff anticipates is “going to accelerate very quickly with their infrastructure.”India is different than both the U.S. and China and will create some new challenges.
Ruff observed that for now, “There’s enough opportunity for the U.S. and we’re excited about what we’re doing here.”
Fractured Wireless Landscape Still Presents a Persistent Challenge
When we last spoke with UIEvoltion, we learned that the big picture goal for UIEvolution is to enable mobile applications to run on any device or network – and we’ve been wondering if there have been any new achievements in this quest for the Holy Grail in the months since. Ruff explained that “the problem isn’t getting any easier -- I’m surprised. We started the company eight years ago, and at initial investor meetings people talked about how Microsoft would solve this problem, and yet eight years later, we have only seen new entrants into the market, but no consolidation or one consistent platform emerge.” Then six months ago with the introduction of Android as a complete open source mobile application stack that was designed to include everything a manufacturer or operator needs to build a mobile phone, “new capabilities came to the market -- but from our perspective, this makes it even more challenging for media companies and operators to think about, and even more handset and device dysfunction.” Ruff finds that UIEvolution “is really well positioned to help the media companies we work with, like AT&T, to think about all these devices with different technical capabilities: how do we extend our brand, build the consumer experience, and build enormous value for our customers? Almost every six months, we can name the entrant of a new player just in mobile,” and this “technically fragmented” landscape in the automotive, IPTV, and wireless spaces will be with us “for a very, very long time. And fundamentally, while we’re solving a challenging problem – we’ve been doing it for eight years – we have a bunch of IP built into the solution that we’ve built.” And this intellectual property can “extend across IPTV, automotive, and emerging markets that we haven’t even thought of. And that makes for a really interesting opportunity for UIEvolution.”
Added Ruff: “The other way that I answer this question, in practical terms, is that I don’t believe that Nokia, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Google, Sun, or Apple are going to ever completely agree on one set of unifying standards,” and that with “all those technical platforms, to hope that some kind of standardization comes out of that – yeh, right!” Ruff noted that it’s “not like the old PC days, now there is a lot of fear and skepticism of partnerships creating one platform.” So even as “great networks like AT&T continue to deliver more powerful handsets,” Ruff expects it “will give us all the ability to elevate the user experience. Our job is still to think about how difficult it is for operators, carriers, to as Travis Beaven, UIEvolution’s Director of Consumer and Service Provider Products has said, ‘frictionlessly get content to end users.’”  » Send this article to a friend... » Comments? Tell us what you think... » More Wireless Web articles... 
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