Geoff Hollingworth, Ericsson Mobility World

Think of Ericsson's Mobility World as a Petri dish for the mobile applications of tomorrow. An international network of regional test centers connecting applications developers with carriers, ISPs, content providers and enterprises, its arsenal of software toolkits, testing and verification services and training seminars facilitate the developmental process, running new apps through a gauntlet of “Traffic and Revenue Growth” and “Match Making” services designed to assess their potential for complementing carriers' decks and generating increased network activity.

“We've put together all of the assets that Ericsson has, that help us understand the marketplace and help deliver strategic direction in terms of applications and products,” said Geoff Hollingworth, the Ericsson vet who oversees the 6-year-old Mobility World initiative. “What is the communication, information and entertainment experience 18 months or two years out? We're spending quite a lot of time trying to understand that alongside our customers.”

A self-described “software guy” who rose through Ericsson's R&D ranks, Hollingworth looks to music as a significant element of that coming experience.

“Mobility World people are working with the big record companies to help them understand how they can best position and monetize their assets down the mobile channel,” he said. “We have a platform, M-USE, that is an aggregation point for the music industry. It allows the publishing of different music content on behalf of the labels and allows an understanding of personalization.”

And while some critics of the next-gen applications market argue that the industry pays too much attention to consumer entertainment services and not enough attention to enterprise and productivity apps, Hollingworth said there's not a huge difference between the two segments.

“Consumers have an increased richness of experience and use on an emotional and fun side, but those same kinds of services are applicable in the enterprise,” he said. “A lot of information is useful to an enterprise if they can share it very quickly and really streamline processes. Take the building industry — every week, they have to take photographs of building sites. Now they can take real-time photos of a building's progress and send it to a central repository.”

But just because the next generation of applications is poised for greater complexity doesn't mean simplicity is no longer a selling point.

“The key to adoption and use is making an application completely invisible,” Hollingworth said. “Things have to be easy and intuitive to use.”
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