"Roughly 50percentt of American households now have a cellphone," said Vince Sandusky, the president of the American Public Communications Council, a pay phone trade association.
Ostensibly a mobile phone trade show, the major GPS companies were there, as well as companies that sell map data and navigation software, much of which can turn a phone into a dash-top GPS clone.
Cellphone company executives are so concerned about these trends that, at the largest mobile phone trade show in Barcelona this month, panelists debated how their industry could better understand how to make customers happy, as Apple seems to do.
Similarly, Mr. Wheeler said that his tenure in the 1990s as head of the cellular phone trade group now known as CTIA-The Wireless Association, was one in which start-up and rapidly growing cellphone competitors were at the forefront of wholesale changes in communications.
Today is the last day of Mobile World Congress, the largest mobile phone trade show in the world.
Prior to becoming a mobile blogger, I knew CTIA as "those dudes that throw the big cell phone trade shows a few times a year".
That's the idea of Flipswap, a mobile phone trade-in and electronics recycling company which is announcing a $14 million round of Series B funding by NGEN Partners and RRE Ventures.
At nearly every big phone trade show, from CES to MWC to IFA, the company invariably shows off a new Xperia iteration and leads with a few new camera tricks.
"There's going to be a day where you press a button and an iTech shows up, delivers you a new phone, trades in your old one, and attaches a damage plan," says iCracked founder AJ Forsythe.
Now that I've been a mobile blogger for a few years, I know CTIA as "those dudes that throw the big cell phone trade shows a few times a year, do some hardware certification stuff, and represent companies within the wireless industry whenever stuff goes crazy".
