Trip to New Orleans
SkyBlue Mobile was the runner up in the student leapfrog category of the Wireless Innovation Contest. IIT gave us an all expense paid trip to New Orleans to attend the CTIA Wireless Conference and receive the award. While there, we made some excellent contacts with cell phone OEM’s and carriers and got some valuable advice about how to proceed toward funding/profitability.
We also had a lot of fun in New Orleans while not working. The travelers were Dan, Kumar, Alex, and myself. We arrived on the morning of Saturday the 12th after driving through the night and crashed in the motel, then went to the contest dinner that night. Afterward, we hit Bourbon St. and partied and danced for a few hours.
The next day we slept into the afternoon and were going to go see the N.O. sights when we got in a car accident. This guy from Bolivia made a left from the right lane straight into our car. That blew our plans for a few hours, and by then it was too late to see much, so we ate, dropped Kumar at a dinner for his employer, got Bruce from the airport, then walked around the French Quarter with Bruce for a while. Most everything was closed except for Bourbon St. so it wasn’t too exciting (except for the female impersonator who grabbed Bruce’s butt 
). We got Kumar when he was done, went back to the motel, and talked about what was going on and what we were going to do the next day.
In the morning, we got up early and went to CTIA. We talked to all the OEM’s and carriers we could, as well as AOL for a content provider. The best contact we got was through Mr. Robert Potter, a trustee at IIT who was attending and wanted to introduce us to someone (I won’t say who to be polite). He gave us so me good advice on how best to approach our customers. We also received the award that day. It was a nice show, though I got the impression it was more important in the industry than it turned out to be. However, the award got us in contact with Telus, a carrier in Canada, and PriceWaterhouseCooper, a company in Canada who may be interested in testing our application. At a Canadian Gov’t. reception after the conference, we caught up with someone from Telus who gave us some more great advice on what we need to be able to go to carriers with a cohesive and attractive offering. That night we drove around looking for something to do and crashed the Nokia CDMA party for a little while, then went back to Bourbon St. and met lots of people from the conference (the Kyocera party was actually in a bar right there).
That’s all, the next morning (Tuesday the 15th) we got up, dropped Bruce at the airport, and came back to Chicago. I thought it was an awesome trip and I would love to go back sometime.