Reporting directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall leads the team responsible for the software platform at the heart of the iconic iPhone device, including the user interface, applications, frameworks and the operating system.
Jay Freeman is a PhD student at the University of California. But in between lectures and seminars he’s found time to take on the mighty Apple. Freeman is the developer of Cydia, an alternative application installer for the iPhone, allowing users to run the programs that Apple refuses to allow into its official App Store.
For all the noise that Google and Symbian might make about the open source nature of their handset operating systems, they are still driven by single vendors. The LiMO Foundation, says Morgan Gillis, is genuinely free of a dominant corporate leader. And Gillis has the responsibility of proving that such an environment can generate an operating system that is truly competitive to those that are more obviously steered.
The leader of the largest US mobile carrier, McAdam will be responsible for bringing his more than 86 million customers into the fold of a single global 4G standard now that Verizon has announced its intention to pursue LTE technology. He also has to manage the sometimes tricky relationship between his two investors, Verizon and Vodafone and their interaction with China Mobile and Softbank as part of the Joint Innovation Lab.
The jewel in Mittal’s rather large corporate crown is Bharti Airtel, India’s leading mobile carrier. With more than 100 million customers it is the third largest single market player after Chinese carriers Mobile and Unicom.
A former chief executive at Vodafone’s Japanese and UK operations, as well as head of the firm’s European portfolio, Bill Morrow now leads US WiMAX carrier Clearwire. Much has been written about the market for WiMAX in a world where cellular standards dominate, and Morrow’s operation now shoulders a burden of proof for the technology and its business model in developed markets.
Having built a portfolio of smaller operations in Central and Eastern Europe as the CEO of Telekom Austria, Boris Nemsic moved in April this year to Vimpelcom, the second-placed Russian carrier that has a portfolio of interests in the CIS as well as Vietnam and Cambodia. The move was a big step up—Telekom Austria had 16.8 million users when Nemsic left compared to Vimpelcom’s 60.9 million.
The GSMA has evolved to become one of the most powerful trade associations in the world, lobbying governments on everything from tax policy to pricing strategy and producing feature-length documentaries on the improvements that mobile has brought to the lives of people across the world.
A young CEO (he was appointed at 43), Obermann’s background is in the mobile operation of DT, T-Mobile. The firm’s mobile assets rank it sixth in the world by customer numbers, with more than 124 million subscribers at the close of Q109. Obermann has focused the carrier on Europe, and it has one of the strongest pan-European portfolios in the world, with a decent spread across the western, central and eastern regions of the continent.
Between them, these two gentlemen are responsible for generating ideas that are good enough to keep Nokia at the leading edge of both handset design and consumer mobile usage.
Charged with growing usage of Facebook around the world and on the mobile platform, Chamath Palihapitiya appears to be performing well. A recent study of UK users between the ages of 16 and 35 revealed that more than a third of the surveyed demographic regularly accesses Facebook accounts from their mobile phone. This is more than the number that access Bebo, Twitter and Myspace combined.
As secretary general of the ITU, Hamadoun Touré is among the most forthright speakers on the role that the ICT sector has to play in the health of the planet and its people.
Prior to assuming the role of executive chairman in 2003, Andrew was the CEO of mBlox, which he co-founded in 1999. Headquartered in California, mBlox claims to be the largest provider of mobile content transmission and billing services in the world, with a particular focus on Europe and the US. In 2008 it processed 2.5 billion mobile transactions, worth $500m.
A former BT chairman and president of PTT in the Netherlands, Verwaayen took on the challenge of Alcatel Lucent in 2008. And a challenge it most certainly is. The previous leadership pairing of Pat Russo and Serge Tchuruk presided over billions of dollars in losses, before being forced to step down amid judgements that their merger had been a disaster. The seemingly insurmountable problems they faced became Verwaayen’s.
In June this year, when Carl-Henric Svanberg announced that he was standing down as the president and CEO of Swedish infrastructure vendor to become chairman of BP, he had already selected his successor; his CFO, Hans Vestberg.
Icelander Jon von Tetzchner is the CEO of Opera Software, a company notable for its development of a successful web browser that’s not called Internet Explorer or FireFox.
Nobody in the cellular industry is responsible for providing cellular service to as many customers as China Mobile’s Wang Jianzhou.
A senior France Telecom executive, Vivek Badrinath also heads up the NGMN alliance, a grouping of cellular carriers
whose mission it is to advise standards bodies responsible for developing future mobile telephony platforms as to exactly what it is that operators want to see delivered.
By far the most popular mobile OS in terms of units shipped—primarily because of Nokia’s market dominance—Symbian is moving into a new phase. Lee Williams is tasked with overseeing this evolution, and ensuring that the new, open source Symbian platform doesn’t lose market share to Apple, Android and RIM.
Spanish incumbent carrier Telefónica is the fourth largest mobile operator in the world. Under the guidance of César Alierta-chairman since 2000-it became the first Spanish company to be listed in the NY Dow Jones 50 Global Titans index, in 2005. Alierta has previously held a board position at China Mobile, and retains a seat on the board of Telecom Italia, in which Telefónica holds a 9.98 per cent stake.
RT @Light_Reading: Longer version here: https://t.co/T8CXZW1uOE? https://t.co/Ro1FgNB3FG
12 December 2019 @ 16:15:16 UTC
Nokia gets German train automation gig https://t.co/kiwldXuam4 #5G #Automation
12 December 2019 @ 13:14:33 UTC
Cisco revamps networking platform with new silicon and software https://t.co/t36hId1sl9 #5G #Fibre
12 December 2019 @ 12:23:32 UTC
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