Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom (Part 2)

Rob Chamberlin: Everybody wants to consume content via mobile devices now and not on a PC or when they’re stationary. That trend is driving what we’re doing. We started the company saying, “Voice and SMS are just going to be apps with mobile users. The value that both consumers and businesses gain from mobility and from wireless networks is data.”

If you think about it, that’s the only thing that consumers are paying for today. Everything else, you assume it to be free. It’s all about how many gigabytes I get per month. Those are the trends that are really driving what we’re doing and certainly our suspicions upon launching the company have been confirmed with what’s happened in the marketplace over the last several years.

To get back to specific use cases, I think a good one is you’re probably quite familiar with the telematics business. Here, blackboxes are used in trucks to monitor a driver’s behaviour, speed, engine diagnostics, and gasoline consumption. What’s happening in that business is that these large companies that are tracking hundreds of millions of vehicles globally are now saying, “We can’t just focus on this. We need to really focus on the mobile workers.”

What we’re seeing in the marketplace today is telematics companies are now focusing not just on the vehicle itself, but on the mobile worker and equipping those folks with tablets and more bandwidth so they could do sales orders. They could close tickets and interface via video with supervisors. These are all use cases that are driving huge adoption of mobility and more consumption of mobile data. It’s a massive trend happening in the marketplace today.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see open problems? If you were to start a company today, what would you start?

Rob Chamberlin: There are some very interesting things happening. If I were starting a company today, I will be looking at a lot of things in the industry on voice. Voice is really migrating to WiFi-first platforms. There’s going to be interesting entrepreneurial opportunities in that space. The carriers are going down a different route. From an entrepreneurial perspective, there’s going to be significant growth and opportunity from WiFi first.

I also think that there are opportunities for software that would either be sold to the operators or directly to consumers via an app that would make consumption of data easier or more efficient. That might be WiFi offload or compression technologies that we haven’t really thought about today. I certainly believe there’s a lot more to come.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom
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