Watch this Space: #ctia

As I've mentioned I'm off to CTIA tomorrow morning at a suitably unpleasant hour.  Also, for my standards, my schedule is relatively light, which means that I have some space left for meetings in the mornings and early(ish) afternoon - if anybody wants to meet.

We hope to make some great announcements next week but it's still 50/50 at the moment.  We hope to be able to discuss an exciting new customer AND new platform deal, and also to formally launch our News and Search appz in public beta.  

However, we're still working on the last minute bits of the code before we go live.  Fingers crossed though!

CTIA will, however, mark the end of the Q1 silly season, which means we might be able to settle down and focus on some other aspects of the business as we enter Q2.  Again, that will mean a slew of new announcements as we head into June.  

What is it with mobile/tech and Q1?

There's a lot of activity in Q1 for the mobile industry, in fact, had I had the money and the inclination, I could probably have been on the road every week for the last 12 without a break.  Even if I'd limited myself to the headline events, there's: CES, Mobile World Congress, SXSW, Mix and CTIA - that's ignoring CeBIT and a bunch of other minor shows and events I was invited to.

For a startup this is a tricky juggling act. Especially after many years of travelling on somebody else's budget.  Finding money for yourself is somewhat scary when you look at 2 Vegas Tradeshows and a European one in the same quarter.

We've managed it, and we're hoping to make some great announcements around then too, so keep an eye on the site/blog.  We're working on our key product launches and a new demo system which should show our technology off extremely well.

We have an Appz for that...

It's been an interesting weekend as we fiddled with the Mix10 Appz and had a think about what it is we had done with it.  We've had some positive feedback from a couple of trial users who liked the general approach and were extremely impressed with the speed at which we'd put the complete application together.

The question they asked, and I suppose one we need to think about is what we do with that? 

Our business goals are clear, we still intend to license the technology to third parties and provide hosted solutions for some of our services.  However, the tactical appz like the MWC App and the Mix App have given us a boost in the web traffic, if nothing else.  To whit, as of this morning the Viafo website has had as much traffic as our previous record breaking month...

With this in mind I think we'll do a CTIA app - it's in keeping with ViaEventz anyway.  But what else should we do?  The World Cup (Soccer, you know the one that practically everybody in the world plays) is coming up in June - should we build an app for that and have it on our main platforms, which should, by then, include WinMo, Bada, iPhone and Android?  Or does that become a low revenue time sink for us?

To be honest, I don't know at the moment.  I'll let you know when we make the decision.