After Perry LaForge's opening remarks the 3G World Congress in Hong Kong kicked off on Tuesday with a speech from Irwin Jacobs. He got right to the point, discussing the progress of the technology and the lower cost of service as a result. The photographers from the local and international press treat Irwin like he's Claudia Schiffer on stage - I guess you need to get YOUR photo of Irwin (well, I did too). Chinese paparazzi. Well, he went on to discuss EVDO and pointed out what I've always thought was the real key to that technology - not the peak speed, but the amount of people you can support at "high" speeds from a single carrier. Some of the speech highlights included a calculation of 2.3 cents/MB of cost, generational compatibility, pin-for-pin compatibility on the hardware and more. There are now 10 million cdma2000 3G customers worldwide. He reminded the audience of his prediction (that as I recall began the slide in telecom stocks, but that's probably just a coincidence) that WCDMA/UMTS would not really take hold until 2004-2005. He made that prediction well over a year ago, I recall, and now he still hopes" that I'm wrong" but looking more right every day. Other than that it was a short speech stuffed with as many CDMA factoids as the new QUALCOMM baseband ASICS which seem to have everything except a CCD on them. The other keynotes included Scott Kriens of Juniper Networks who gave the view from below the ground. He said we should stop waiting for the "telecom industry to come back...it is not going to do that" Well, I agree, but, his perspective is biased. But he made some excellent points - more people typing than talking, or maybe ust doing both. The need for increaseds in network intelligence and security will increase...today's mobile problems were the problems 4 years ago on the internet...don't confuse capacity with scale; the former is a one shot deal while the latter is really the ability to have sufficient flexibilty to meet multiple needs. Distribution, and telecom reliabiltiy will help grow 3G. OK. Got it. David Nagle of PalmSource focused on the big challenges: discover the killer app (which once again got the award for "most overused phrase" at yet another convention) discover the killer device (could it be...a Palm device?) pricing that works for carriers and subs (free?) achieving the ubiquity of the networks (ahmen), ease of service provisioning and a great user experience. Starting at that last point, and having just added a Palm 705i to my arsenal of devices, . I wholeheartedly agree with that! I still have wierd issues that the Palm support group has been helping out with. I've given them a break during this trip. He had a great vugraph of the history of the handheld device:Eo, GriD 1910, Casio Zoomer, Apple Newton. He finally finished up with that palm commercial with the two trains where the two people beam their contact info from train to disappearing train, followed by the Letterman copy where the message from the hottie on trian b says "quit staring at me, freakshow" that even got laughs with the chinese crowd. I saw Yankowski, the former CEO show this same set of video clips at the Andy Seybold conference in Arizona a couple of years ago. There were some other good talks too, including Pascal DeBon from Nortel, and Rob Glaser, founder of RealNetworks...boy can that guy talk fast! I don't think anybody told Rob it was a CDMA conferenceHe had charts about 3GPP (a GSM focused group), and did a demo on what I thought was a GPRS phone, only later to learn it was a HSCSD phone. Never heard that last acronum have you. seldom used, it stands for High Speed Circuit Switched Data. GSM on steriods, but with no packet service and no latency. I think it was the Nokia 7650. Anyway, he played a short audio clip from netaudio and pointed out that netradio was far more popular than video (not surprising). His point was to gradually role out better and better services instead of swinging for the fences the first time up. Apparently there were many streaming video players that dropped out of the market due to poor performance while Real was growing a market share from low speed/low quality streaming audio. He also made a good point about price elasticity with broadband, pointing out that in Korea penetration is much higher than in the US which he attributed to the lower $22 price point compared to Cable/DSL $45 price points. All in all a decent opening act to a mid-sized crowd.