CTIA Day One End of Day Keynote From Last Night Part 2: Dan Hesse of Sprint

[dgstorm]

Our next CEO feature in the roundtable keynote series is Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint/Nextel. Mr. Hesse had quite a few things to discuss, and he did it with his usual affable and humorous demeanor. Here are the highlights:

• Mr. Hesse really stressed how fast the mobile space is growing and how it impacts all our lives.
• He heavily emphasized mobile security, driving the point home multiple times. He wasn't talking primarily about hackers and viruses either.
• His main focus was on people and companies collecting info on us and what they are doing with it. He reiterated that this is a HUGE problem. (Dan Mead touched on it briefly as well.)
• Mr. Hesse shared that Sprint Nextel wants to guarantee its customers' safety, security, and privacy by implementing a suite of apps that will ensure the customers info is safe and secure.
• One particular app he highlighted was a parental control and safety suite of apps called Sprint Guardian. Here's a quick breakdown of a few things it can do:
  1. Sprint Mobile Controls – Clearly understand your child’s talk, text and app use habits. Lock your child’s phone on demand or schedule locks – during dinner, school or late at night. Browse your child’s contacts and apps downloaded to the phone.
  2. Sprint Drive First – Automatically locks your teenagers’ mobile phones when they’re traveling more than 10 mph and unlocks when they stop driving. Direct incoming calls to voicemail and silence distracting alerts while driving.
  3. Sprint Family Locator – Quickly and easily locate your family members on an interactive map. Set up automatic location checks to get notified that your kids made it to school safely and on time.
• He also mentioned that a 3rd party company will be brought in to test the integrity of the security they have in place so the customer can be sure their claims are solid.
• Sprint's focus is to gain the consumer's trust, so that when they are on Sprint, they know their info is safe and secure.

One other thing that came forward in the discussion is that all of the carriers are suffering from a lack of customer satisfaction. It's at an all time low right now. Supposedly, that's across the board and they are all quite surprised by it. All the companies emphasized that they will be working hard to improve that.

Quick sidenote: Sprint/Nexel is the 3rd Greenest Company in US.