Tuning out entertainment - CTIA 2010 preview

With the application ecosystem continuing to explode, traditional mobile entertainment appears to be almost completely out of the spotlight at next week's CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas. From the looks of this year's CTIA conference schedule, onetime revenue tentpoles like mobile music downloads and wallpapers are now as passé as a Baha Men ringtone: Billboard's annual Mobile Entertainment Live! event is on hiatus this time around, with its usual Monday pre-show slot filled by the new Mobile Web & Apps Forum as well as a daylong Mobile Marketing & Advertising seminar keynoted by Google's director of mobile advertising Diana Poullot.

Monetizing the mobile consumer experience also looks to be a dominant theme of this year's CTIA educational sessions--Tuesday afternoon brings both the "What's a Mobile Ad Network Worth?" and "Mobile Marketing for 2010: Successful Brand Strategies" panels, with "Mobile Money 101: The Overview Course on What's Now and What's Next" following a day later.

But the present state of mobile content is best exemplified by the Wednesday panel "Off-Portal Content: Coming Full Circle," which brings together speakers including Handmark CEO Paul Reddick, Nortel Vice President of Product Management John McCready and BlackBerry Partners Fund partner Matt Golden to analyze the evolution from on-deck sales to app store downloads. That same day, executives from AT&T Disney Sony Pictures Television and others explore "Mobile Video: Overcoming Fragmentation for the Benefit of Users."

As for what people will be talking about on the show floor, perhaps you've heard of a company called Apple? As usual, the computing giant is expected to be a no-show, but with its iPad tablet device scheduled to hit U.S. retailers April 3, content providers of all shapes and sizes are gearing up for the next media revolution. Already, Walt Disney Company President and CEO Robert Iger is on record predicting the iPad will emerge as a "game changer."

Further, expect mobile social networking to dominate conversation as well. Location-centric startups like Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla have already captured the hipster segment, and appear poised to go mainstream.

And let's not forget Thursday's closing round table, which features Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy CTO Aneesh Chopra and Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron, still riding high on the success of the blockbuster "Avatar." It's anyone's guess what Cameron will have to say about the mobile industry--let's just hope it's in English, not Na'vi.