Something's BREWing

Carriers insist on distilling market and usage trends into some kind of science that they can learn and administer to the masses. I'm at Qualcomm's BREW 2004 conference in San Diego this week, where it is still somewhat early in the afternoon. Yet as I write this, I have heard the term "viral marketing" more times than I have seen young, fire-haired surfer dudes who actually turn out to be software developers (and believe me, that is no small feat).

Jay Ellison, executive vice president at U.S. Cellular, gave an animated speech this morning that dealt with, among other things, viral marketing and how to make it happen. Ellison said that carrier sales associates need to put new phones and applications in the hands of potential customers so that they can see for themselves how wonderful wireless data is. This seems like good advice to me, and also a pretty simple thing that most carriers should have figured out by now.

By its very definition, viral marketing sounds like something that can't be controlled. In reality, there is no way to determine which services and applications will become wildly popular. The best that carriers can do is to sit back and try to respond accordingly. Maybe data acceptance hasn't been fast enough for a lot of people, but it will happen.

There is an electronic ticker outside the entry to the conference here that is quickly counting off the number of BREW-based content downloads worldwide. The last time I looked it was at 130,017,642...and it was moving pretty fast.

E-mail me at doshea@primediabusiness.com