The Superphone is unstoppable
Rob Glaser is chairman of RealNetworks and a venture partner at Accel. He will be moderating a mobile investing panel at our MobileBeat 2010 conference on July 12 — the conference theme, not coincidentally, is “The Year of the Superphone.”
Context & Ripple Effects
VentureBeat's MobileBeat 2010, themed 'The Year of the Superphone,' is less a product launch than a capital-markets signal: Rob Glaser — who spent years running RealNetworks as CEO back in a 2007 GigaOM conversation and now sits as its chairman while a venture partner at Accel — is moderating the investing panel on July 12. A media-software veteran moving to the investor side of the table is itself the arc: the money is chasing the device tier.
The 'superphone' framing lands amid visible incumbent anxiety. Palm's chief executive made headlines in January 2010 by admitting he had never used an iPhone, and TechCrunch's iDroid Wars episode that fall framed the fight as platform war rather than handset rivalry — the backdrop against which a conference dedicates its entire theme to the high-end smartphone.
First-order effects
- Startups pitching at MobileBeat on July 12 get direct exposure to Accel through Glaser's panel, concentrating early-stage mobile deal flow around whoever defines the 'superphone' category.
- RealNetworks' own chairman now carries its flag inside an investor forum, signaling that media-software firms see their next act on high-end smartphone platforms rather than desktop.
Second-order effects
- Rival handset makers and carriers competing for developer and investor mindshare — Palm among them — face pressure to show up at precisely these themed venues or cede the narrative to Apple and Android ecosystems.
- As the panel channels capital toward superphone-layer apps and services, feature-phone-era businesses lose relative access to funding regardless of their current revenue.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, early-stage mobile investing consolidates around a small set of high-end smartphone platforms, making platform choice — not hardware specs — the structural decision for founders and their backers.
The trend: Capital and industry attention are converging on the high-end smartphone as the default computing platform, with conference themes and investor panels tracking the same migration.