Industries and innovations collide at CTIA E&A 2011

SAN DIEGO--True story: It's a few minutes after 11:00 am Wednesday here at the CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2011 conference, and the morning keynote session has just wrapped up. A colleague and I are conducting the postmortem on the previous evening's misadventures when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around, and it's a guy I've known since high school--he now lives in Portland, and while we're still in touch, I haven't seen him in five years, maybe longer. "I should have known you would be here," he says, but what's crazy is that there's no reason why he should be here. The last time we hung out, he was doing some writing for an automotive magazine. He still is--since he was already in southern California on assignment, he decided to pop in to the CTIA show to check out Cadillac's new CUE in-vehicle connected driving system, announced Tuesday. It's a perfectly logical reason for someone with no roots in mobile to attend a mobile event, of course... even if it doesn't make our random run-in any less surreal.

This is what the CTIA Enterprise & Applications show is about now: People from all walks of industry coming together to explore how mobile technology can reshape their business--and, no less significant, how their business can reshape mobile technology. "Mobile and commerce are on a collision course," said American Express group president of enterprise growth Dan Schulman during his entertaining Wednesday keynote spot, but you could swap out any other business segment in place of "commerce" and the statement would still be correct. It's all converging--cars, commerce, healthcare, you name it. Whatever it is, mobile is integral to its future, and vice versa.

That makes CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2011 a conference spinning off into a multitude of different directions--and makes it very difficult to assess. A week ago, everyone expected Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) to unveil Android's Ice Cream Sandwich operating system update during the Samsung Unpacked event, but the two companies scrapped their plans following the death of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer on Oct. 5. With no other significant announcements grabbing the spotlight, the conference was painfully short on breaking news but long on intriguing ideas, like AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) president and CEO Ralph de la Vega forecasting the connected devices market will soon evolve to support body-monitoring systems allowing users to track the physical welfare of everyone from firefighters to infants. The possibility that today's speculation will materialize as tomorrow's innovation is why many attendees will come back for CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2012. You never know who else might join them.--Jason

PS. You can see all of our CTIA coverage in this Special Report: CTIA E&A 2011: Complete coverage