A high-level, three-day conference on multimedia-enabled handsets will be held in Amsterdam this March. Informa's second-annual “Multimedia Handsets” event, March 20-23, will be preceded on March 19th by a one-day Khronos Group workshop entitled “Creating an Embedded Media Processing Ecosystem.”

Informa is a large market research company that also hosts conferences and industry events in a broad range of markets. Its “telecoms and media” division forecasts that by 2011, TV-enabled handset shipments will reach 120 million, music enabled phones 691 million, and external memory enabled phones 950 million.

The Khronos Group is an influential industry group that promotes audio/video hardware and software interoperability, by maintaining half a dozen specifications — including the recently unveiled OpenKODE meta-spec positioned as an open alternative to Microsoft's DirectX. The Khronos Group suggests the Dutch conference could be well-attended, noting that Apple's recently announced iPhone has “shot multimedia handsets into the forefront” of telecom industry discussion.

Informa promises its conference will address the hottest topics in the telecom industry, which it lists as:

• Creating mobile musical experiences to rival stand-alone mp3 players
• Customizing the user experience to drive mobile content ARPU (average revenue per user)
• Progress towards Mobile TV
• Applications driving next-generation handset requirements
• Opportunities offered by increased connectivity
• Opportunities opened up by innovation and standardization in mobile gaming
• Unified messaging systems
• Technological advances in multimedia handset display technology

Additional details about the Informa conference can be found here. More about the Khronos workshop can be found on its website, here.

 
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