Mobile World Congress 08: Mobile ramblings from Barcelona

It’s nearly impossible to summarize all the buzz, but I’ll give it my best shot:    

• Mobile apps on the cusp and/or ready to explode include: social networking; search; gaming; mobile advertising (sorry); consumer-created content; mobile TV; mobile movies; mobile theatre sound; and payments. 
• Some new buzzwords from Barcelona: “V2IP” which stands for interactive two-way real-time multimedia on the phone; “on-device portals,” which capture content via a browser to use less online time; and “3-screens,” which means a large home screen + a desktop screen + phone screen all sharing the same digital content.
• Despite Apple not having the impact it had at last year’s GSM , the iPhone has nevertheless shaken the mobile market. In Barcelona, the major handset makers (Nokia, Samsung, Sony) waxed about the need for simpler interfaces and better mobile software. LG and Samsung showed off touch-screen capabilities. The term “tridgets” made their debut in Barcelona, meaning mobile devices that depend 100% on the network for all controls and data. The iPhone is the tridget du jour.
•  While handsets are increasingly richened (see exceptions below), the real play, of course, is content. The mobile business is focused on giving consumers the experience they want; the content they need, when they want it, how they want it. Nokia’s Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said at MWC: “New services will touch time, place and location.” 
• Perhaps the hottest technology in Barcelona was mobile satellite, or GPS-enabled phones. “Geo tagging” was a new term bandied about; it refers to snapping a photo with your phone and then GPS receivers tagging it with its actual location on earth. Semiconductor designers – including NXP, SiRF and CSR – have built GPS systems on single, very low cost silicon chips. GPS navigation will be available on mobile phones at less than $3 to consumers. Mind boggling.
• With more mobile apps running on Windows Mobile 6, more attention is being paid to security. Samsung and Sony Ericsson handsets, for example, run Windows Mobile 6. McAfee talked this up at MWC. McAfee’s 2008 mobile operator survey revealed that 79 percent of the 3 billion subscribers use unprotected devices. Scary.   
• Gemalto, the $2.2 billion digital security leader had a very busy booth. OnePin was one of their interesting partner collaborations. These guys market CallerXchange, a peer-to-peer application that enables mobile phone users to automatically send, insert and update contact information in SIM phonebooks with the click of a button. It may sound like a niche app at first glance, but it isn’t. The proliferation of contact information is the heart and soul of phonebook content: the more names and numbers, the more calls. Mobile phone operators like this a lot. The cool part is that it’s simple and universal but also permission-based.
• One of the vendors that surprised (or scared in the case of telecom software vendors) people at MWC 08 was Huawei. The Chinese vendor’s software division came out guns-a-blazing with their expansion into the network equipment market. These guys have lots of software in many different flavors and they can low-cost themselves into emerging markets.
• Mobile is huge for consumers, sure, but it’s also growing like a weed in the workplace. Mid-sized and large organizations are increasingly arming their people with mobile devices. There’s huge upside here. Just ask companies like RIM which cut its teeth in business first.
• Some visionary, yet historically traditional, telco vendors are reinventing themselves, leveraging their rich customer data to get to a new place. At MWC, vendors like Ulticom (a Beaupre client), showcased very cool new capabilities in the area of identity management. By connecting 2 billion subscribers all over the world to telecom networks, Ulticom can enable premium consumer apps like geo-location, mobile TV, video-on-demand, bank authentication and pay-per-view.
• Similarly, vendors (think Sun, IBM, Oracle, Alcatel-Lucent) are urging telcos to leverage their data to support customer apps like real-time campaign management, advertising and personalization.
•  Africa is the next big mobile market, with South America right behind. Mobile marketing is of “particular interest” to companies in South America, according to One Point, a mobile survey company that polled people at MWC.
   
• Despite all the high-end mobile phone hoopla, vendors are also focusing on the massive opportunity in the non mobile rest-of-world. Spice launched the People’s Phone, a stripped-down, $20 product that doesn’t have a screen and only does voice and text (Braille keyboard option available). Remember that 5 billion people don’t use any communication technology; phones like this will be very appealing. 
• Music and movies are hot emerging apps; some new devices enable music and motion picture downloads in an under $25 phone. Dolby Labs’ “Dolby Mobile,” touted “surround sound on the move,” rivaling theatre quality. 
• IBM (a Beaupre client) had many announcements and plenty of momentum at MWC 08. They collaborated with Vodafone to demonstrate how social networks can be extended to any mobile device. They showed how mobile phones and “presence” technology – combined with health records – can provide a potential ‘good Samaritan’ with information on how to help people in critical medical situations. And because businesses and consumers are demanding more defense against voice, video and Internet mobile viruses, they demonstrated advanced security that keeps carrier-grade network services free of malicious traffic.
• Former Beaupre client (and great guy) Steve Chambers, President of Nuance, talked about “voice dialing,” also called “voice-to-screen,” a capability that enables text messages to be spoken. The auto makers will like this one.
• Google’s Android platform was a prevalent buzz topic. It will feature a touch capability in a device rumored to have a 300 Mhz processor – half the iPhone’s current capability. Imagine the kind of mobile apps possible with this kind of efficiency.
• Smartphones have been slow to get traction in the U.S. We typically want to take our phones out of the box and start using them without figuring out complex features (or in my case, ever reading the manual). The Touch UI from Symbian has an operating system that’s open source; encouraging momentum for lots of third party applications. 

All in all, an amazing place to hang out for a week. I was blown away with the pace, vigor and innovation.