Richard Irving, a partner at venture capital firm Pond Venture Partners, sees that making all the exciting consumer advances work together is a big challenge for the CE industry.
This month saw the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, formerly known as 3GSM. Along with the Consumer Electronics Show, these shows are probably the main events for the global electronics industry.
As everyone knows, the cutting-edge of the mobile world is in Europe or Asia, and while MWC has about a third of CES's attendees, Barcelona is also a much nicer place than Las Vegas (receptions in an 11th century monastery certainly beat anything in Vegas!), so there is an amazing number of US VCs and entrepreneurs who head over each year.
And while it seemed a little more subdued than last year, there were several things worth noticing.
Leading edge companies were already demonstrating LTE, the next big thing beyond 3G and WiMAX, though it's unlikely to deploy before 2010. 2008 is looking more and more like the year of serious WiMAX deployment. Femtocells or home base stations were very much in evidence and with field trials well advanced these too should roll out this year. And mobile video was everywhere.
But there are still some very obvious mobile applications which either have yet to appear or do not work very well.
While more and more phones have GPS built-in, even over EDGE maps load slowly and there is little integration with phone address books, an obvious gap. Mobile browsing is a slow, unhappy procedure which even the big boys have yet to solve - Yahoo's new announcement at the show was not accompanied by a demo. And the much-vaunted Google phone at ARM's booth was fun to play with till you tried to get on the web - no dice.
Meanwhile mobile advertising whether useful or annoying, has yet to evolve beyond text except in demos. So I'd expect VCs to start paying a lot more attention to companies offering better mobile experiences than to simply backing the latest gadgets, however cool they might look.