INTERNATIONAL CTIA WIRELESS 2012

For the first time, I registered to attend the International CTIA Wireless 2012 Show to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 8-10, 2012.

CTIA, which stands for Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, approved my credentials as a Member of the Press. It also invited me to be a Judge of the 2012 CTIA Emerging Technology (E-Tech) Awards competition, which is on its seventh year.

The E-Tech Awards program draws hundreds of entries and honors the most innovative new products in the areas of mobile apps, consumer electronics, enterprise and infrastructure.

The International CTIA WIRELESS Show is All Things Mobile. It draws more than 40,000 qualified attendees every year; occupies more than 300,000 sq. ft. of exhibit space and hosts over 1,000 exhibitors.

Featured Keynote Speakers include Former President Bill Clinton; Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski; Gary Flood, President of the Global Products Division of the MasterCard Worldwide; Joe Kennedy, CEO & President of PANDORA; Patrick Riordan, President & CEO of Cellcom; Ralph de la Vega, President & CEO, AT&T Mobility; Dan Resse, CEO , Sprint Nextel Corporation; Philip Rumm, CEO & President, T-Mobile USA; Dan Mead, President & CEO, Verizon Wireless; Daniel Ek, CEO & Co-Founder Spotify; Gary Kovacs, CEO Mozilla Corporation; John Partridge, President of VISA, Inc.; and John Ricctiell, CEO of Electronic Arts.

Attendees will include service operators, retailers/distributors, applications providers, enterprise and vertical market users, content providers and mobile web companies.

Of course, there will be at least 1,000 press and analysts worldwide, and offers the most comprehensive educational programming in the industry.

The new Solutions Showcase features interactive exhibits from industry leaders such as AT & T, Verizon, Dell and Accenture who will bring wireless advancements to life. The attendees will experience current innovations and the future of wireless enterprise technology in automotive, energy and health.

Emerging Technology Showcase will feature more than 100 of the newest innovations.

The CTIA World will celebrate the wireless industry with interactive displays, programming and information on the grass-roots movement in each state.

I am particularly interested in seeing the Corporate Philanthropy Pavilion. This is supposed to be the first corporate social responsibility pavilion showcasing the different ways wireless technology makes our communities a better place to live.

The trend is going for All Things Mobile! CTIA is the driving force of this trend.

Reading in this Digital Age­

“Library in my pocket, knowledge at my fingertips.”

This is a phrase that we used to promote the eBookMan, an eBook reading device that my company had the license to manufacture and exclusively distribute in the Philippines.

It also served as a music player, MP3 and audiobook player aside from being a very good eBook reader. Amazon.com later on bought its technology and its successor device became the Amazon Kindle.

Having distributed the eBookMan, I learned to convert ordinary documents into the eBook format and download them into eBook devices. Correspondingly, I was able to create electronic libraries that are stored, retrievable, searchable, bookmarkable and annotatable in the eBookMan initially, and in all handheld devices eventually.

The most popular electronic library that we created in the Philippines was the electronic law library that contained all the Philippine laws and the Supreme Court decisions since 1901. We coined the phrase, addressing it to customers- mainly lawyers and law students, “You can now take the law into your own hands.” For PALM Pilot devices we called the library, “Law on the Go”.

When the Amazon Kindle became available in the United States, I purchased it knowing that all my existing libraries are transferable. It also let me continue converting documents into the eBook format that are downloadable and readable through the Kindle or Kindle Readers installed in other devices.

When I say documents, I mean docs that are in my computer as well as from online sources. Once these documents are stored in my computer or in my external hard drives, they are indexed. Hence, they all become searchable especially when they are converted into the eBook format.

Having access to a lot of data, information and knowledge from the Internet and from my own computer are indeed luxuries that many of us enjoy in this digital age. They all make us learned or potentially become one if we just desire to be such and dedicate some time to doing it.

Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others index the documents in the Internet. Of course, the offline search engines of your computers do the same.

Lately, I have explored other sources of knowledge derived from published and indexed books. These are the national and local public libraries and the university libraries.

As a resident of Fairfax County, Virginia my library card allows me to access eBooks and audiobooks online and/or download them into my laptop, Kindle, iPAD, iPod (audio), Android, or iPhone.

As an alumnus of two universities in the U.S. I can also access their libraries. Their digital libraries are also good sources. Google is now digitizing the books of many major universities and is gradually making them available online. Project Gutenberg has digitized hundreds of thousands of books and making them available for free. With public support, they continue to digitize more and offer more.

When I was a young boy my father, who was a schoolteacher, used to say, “Just master the art of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, and you can survive, be competitive, and succeed.”

Nothing can be more true in this digital age.

I am attending FOSE 2012 as I write this column.  Like in the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 and MACWORLD/IWorld, I am lucky to obtain Press Credentials.

Originally named as plain Federal Office Systems Exposition (FOSE) exhibiting office ware in the Federal Government, it has evolved over the years as “the premier government information technology (IT) event that brings together federal, state, local and private sector partners to share the latest innovations and best practices in technology implementation.”

This year FOSE 2012 is focusing on both technology and policy management. It is comprised of five conferences: Cybersecurity, Cloud and Virtualization, Mobile Government, Defense Innovations as well as Records and Information Management.

Produced by 1105 Media's Government Events Group efficiently and effectively, FOSE 2012 is being held April 3 - 5 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

Providing a yearlong educational forum, FOSE will also host individual conferences for each of the topic areas above during 2012.

Kicking off the event on April 3rd was U.S. Chief Information Officer (CIO) Steven VanRoekel who delivered the opening keynote address. He expounded on the current landscape of federal IT as well as his vision for implementing a
common approach to the design of future federal architectures.

Tom Koulopolous, author of “The Innovation Zone”, was the featured speaker early in the afternoon. Koulopolous is known for “taking mystery out of innovation.”

One of the sessions that I attended was “The Dark Side of Facebook”. The speaker, Alix Levine who is the owner of WEBehavior, a consulting firm, discussed some samples and case studies on how the enemies of our way of life use Facebook for their sinister ends. I plan to write a separate article on this topic later.

The Wednesday keynote speaker will be former Senator George Mitchell and special envoy for Middle East peace. He is expected to offer a global perspective on government IT, including the impact of technology and social media on world political currents.

He will be followed in the afternoon by the first Navy SEAL ever to be appointed to a four-star flag rank, Adm. Eric Olson. His views on using technology to enhance the “new fighter warrior” will be aired. He will also offer “Lessons from the Bull Frog SEAL Commander”.

FOSE will feature five top women in government IT in a panel discussion on Thursday. They are Judy Marks, president of Siemens Government Technology; Dawn Meyerriecks, assistant director in the
Office of the National Director for Intelligence; Linda Rix, president of Avue Technologies; Lisa Schlosser, deputy administrator of OMB’s office of e-government and IT; and Susan Swart, CIO of the State Department. The panel will be moderated by 1105 Government Information Group President Anne Armstrong.

Being a member of the media, I am allowed to attend any or all of the sessions. Since I am unable to attend all, I will focus on some interesting sessions on Mobile Government, Cybersecurity, Cloud and Virtualization and Records and Information Management Conference Agenda. I will miss all the sessions on Defense Innovations because of time limitations.

I also plan to write about them in my next column.

It is indeed exciting and interesting to attend these sessions or conferences involving the government and its industry partners in the field of technology. I cite,for example, the initial stages of the Internet, the eBook and the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) technologies.
We all know that the Internet got started at the initiative of the U.S. Government. I was fortunate to be one of the first attendees of the conferences sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government on the eBook technology.

It was also due to these eGov conferences that I learned about the UAV technology. In fact, I was even appointed by one of the manufacturers/suppliers of the military to represent them in Southeast Asia.

In the case of the Philippines, the company was even willing, not only to sell it there, but also to transfer the technology for commercialization and for use of our military.

Unfortunately, despite an approved budget that passed through Philippine Congress to finance a pilot project, we failed to consummate an agreement probably because of our insistence on following the Anti-Corrupt Practices Act of the United States.

It might be worthwhile pursuing it again under the current Philippine regime if it is still possible. It is a very inexpensive and safe way to monitor our shorelines including those of the Spratlys.