Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: A Discussion with Rahul Patel, VP Product Marketing for Wireless Connectivity Combos, Broadcom (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So you need somebody like Google between you and a developer ecosystem?

Rahul Patel: Yes. Google is a customer of Broadcom. That is how I would look at it.

SM: When you look at the wearable market or the Internet of Things in a broader sense, what are some of the open problems that you would encourage entrepreneurs to work on?

RP: We sometimes get carried away with the idea that what works in Silicon Valley may work everywhere in the world. My mother wears a watch. I am not sure whether she has a new generation wearable watch or not. Maybe she would care, if it was designed to meet her requirements. Then it would be appealing to her. What matters is that this market is a lot bigger than the smart phone market. People need to think about the average consumer, not the typical high-tech consumer. That is the biggest challenge in my opinion. We need to take it a bit further than where we normally take our high-tech products.

SM: If you remember, the MP3 player came onto the market long before the iPod and it didn’t take off until that “crossing the chasm” problem was solved by the iPod and the iTunes Store.

RP: It is getting to a point where, to use the example of my mother, she was happy about the smart phone, she was happy to see things the smart phone can do, but she has now boiled down the smart phone to two or three things. One is the phone, the second is checking e-mails, and the third is messaging. She doesn’t do anything other than that. That is exactly what a lot of consumers are getting to. At the end of the day, these things vary from one region to another. The question is if those are ubiquitous in terms of usage, standardized across multiple cultures, etc. The opportunity is there to take the market by a massive surprise and appeal to the market as quickly as you address all these problems.

But the challenge for us is to not overlook these things as we come across developing these products. That is where the big thing is. You see the latest and greatest gadgets coming to the forefront, but the iPad is going to be $600. It is a great device. I see a lot of schools in Silicon Valley now adopting the iPad. The iPad is a device that has everything a child would need. But can that iPad be the same iPad for a Silicon Valley high school student as it is for someone in another part of the world? That is the big question. How do we solve these problems? I think we will crack those points at some point – the sooner the better. That is the philosophy I would like to see. Our marketing force in Silicon Valley addresses some of these baseline technologies – products that are already [being] adopted, but not as high-tech.

SM: This is what I was addressing before with the washer/dryer example. Those are not killer apps. The real unsolved problem is what are the killer apps that are really going to make people use some of those devices. The fitness applications on wearables are compelling because they measure important metrics and let you act on them. That is a powerful use case.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: A Discussion with Rahul Patel, VP Product Marketing for Wireless Connectivity Combos, Broadcom
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