It was quite a show for the ng Connect Program at this year’s CTIA Wireless in Vegas! Mixing it up with our customers at the 4G Symposium, hanging out with all the members at the Tao mixer, winning an award and having the booth packed with attendees interested in the ng Connect PoCs are just a few highlights!

Alcatel-Lucent held its annual 4G Symposium event on March 31st at The Bellagio, the day before CTIA. We had a great turnout of 250 customers and conducted wide-ranging discussions about how new media and next generation networks will change industries and our lives. At the 4G Symposium we had a number of great speakers from our membership, including Buzznet, Connect2Media, HP, Samsung and SIGNEXX. We showed off seven demos including Mobile Enhanced Reality with Social Sharing; Breakthrough e-Healthcare; Music as a Social Experience; 4G Mobile Gaming; Dynamic Digital Signage; Connected Home and the Connected Car.

We brought some of the demos over to the CTIA Wireless Show booth where we had over 1200 scanned customer visitors over the course of three days! Another highlight of the show was that the ng Connect Proof of Concept for MER (Mobile Enhanced Reality) won second place in the 2009 CTIA E-Tech Awards!

The demo was similar to this earlier demo of Mobile Enhanced Reality that we put together where a mobile phone in front of a movie poster showed a trailer of the movie and enablers to rent or buy the movie as well.

Hundreds of people coming to the booth were very excited with the innovation on display and strongly supported our collective vision and collaboration for bringing enhanced applications to the market quickly.

We were pleased to work with members 4DK, Atlantic Records, Buzznet, dimedis, FISHLABS, LearningMate, HP, Samsung, SIGNEXX, Total Immersion, Tunewiki and Words & Numbers on the proofs of concept shown.

On the evening of Day 1 of CTIA, Alcatel-Lucent hosted the ng Connect mixer at Tao in the Venetian Hotel with almost 50 attendees from current and potential members. Alcatel-Lucent executives in attendance included Kenny Frank – President of Solutions & Marketing, Robert Vrij – President of Americas Region and Mary Chan – President of LTE/4G Networks. Ideas flowed like the cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, and I really enjoyed getting involved in some interesting debates about business models, operator demands and machine-to-machine communications.

While the saying is “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, I think we gave them all too much to talk about for this to apply to the ng Connect Program!

Posted by Chris Carfagnini, under CTIA Wireless, Consumer Media & Entertainment, Digital Signage, Enterprise Productivity & e-Healthcare, Events, Membership, Videos.
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