Mobile World Congress 2012 –Summary, Conclusions, Trends

MWC12 has come and gone –with attendance ballooning to approximately 67,000 visitors, the event is becoming as much a test of stamina and personal fitness as much as being a showcase of new devices, infrastructure and mobile lobbying (mostly by the GSMA).

Each yearly edition comes with its own unique flavor -3 years ago saw the rise in prominence of content providers (and the App Planet) ,2 years ago the industry was in crisis-mode and the mood was gloomy at the show. Last year, the Chinese manufacturers staked their claim on the mobile sector with force. This year, the ambition and determination of Chinese manufacturers ZTE and especially Huawei was made even clearer.

Of all the devices, the Huawei Ascend series with their quad-core processors, clear displays and crisp Dolby sound impressed, though HTC were not far behind with their line-up (even though it had less marketing pzazz).

Nokia made an astonishing comeback at the show, with a very large area in Hall 7 dedicated to showcasing their new 808 PureView 41MP award-winning Symbian phone and the new Lumia line-up that was created with a grassroots approach to design and has plenty of appeal to that key 25-35 socio-demographic with its stylish casing and colour combinations. It is clear that WindowsPhone has all the cards in place to become a serious Number 3 OS player, and it is now down to executing on strategy.

Perhaps disappointing was the lack of true innovation in devices at the show (I was showcased a 2005-style GPS app by NTTDoCoMo this year , which was a very bizarre experience). I was amused by the waterproof handsets and tablets by Fujitsu ( a good idea) and by NFC-enabled advertising billboards by SK Telecom, but overall, the term  “innovative “ was not the order of the day.

My personal best marketing award goes to Android/Google for captivating the imagination of congress delegates with different styled Android figures, a touch wall, an Android robot capable of making customized device cases and, of course, the Ice Cream sandwich ice-cream. Mobile is about having fun in a personalized way as much as it is about communication, and Google gets this, so hats off.

Calling all developers -WIPJAM comes to Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2011

In a refreshing departure from tradition, I am not providing any predictions for 2011 (or any other future year) as a final/first post of the year.

Instead, I wanted to share some information about the upcoming WIPJam taking place at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) on the 17th of February 2011 starting at 10am in the App Planet @ Hall 7 of the exhibition. The WIPJAM is organised by the great WIP Connector team.and with over 200 attendees (already a sell-out), promises to be even bigger and better than last year's. Don't panic if you didn't make it in time to register, you can still put your name on a Waiting List..

As if this wasn't enough, WIP is also organising the WIPJAM Carnival of Nations Party on the 16th February at 19.30 @Marmalade. This is "THE" Developer Party at MWC so you don’t want to miss it!  Come and connect with all the members of the mobile ecosystem.  This won't be just any boring old party.  Back by popular demand, they will have WIP "Jameoke" for the third time - bigger and better than ever!  Practice your singing skills to join the fun!  

You can find more info and registration by clicking here:

Mobile World Congress 2010-#mwc10 Summary Part 2

Time precludes me from going into more detail about my Mobile World Congress experience, but as a second part of my earlier post, here are some observations about the past event:

NOTABLE ABSENCES

It was widely announced prior to the Congress that Nokia (and later LG) would be absent as exhibitors at the event. Nokia's cheeky move was to locate their Barcelona event HQ 100m from the entrance to the show at the ONCE Building on Gran Via. It is anyone's guess whether this actually was a money-saver (hiring a whole building is not cheap) but perhaps the bigger irony of the location was lost on others. In fact, the ONCE building is the Spanish Association for the Blind. Given Nokia's loss of traction in the key smartphone market, it was perhaps apt that they should be headquartered in a 'blind spot'.

LG's absence was hard to understand, but allowed Samsung to take all the glory from fans of Korean technology. Their App Store strategy is even more baffling, as LG launched a LiMo App Store (in some countries) but is looking to scrap that for a more generic store.

Another notable absentee was Palm.Those present last year, will have witnessed a great hoo-hah over their Palm Pre..clearly, all is not well at Palm, as they were near-invisible at this year's event

IT'S GOOGLE TIME!

It was to be expected. Google stole a great deal of the limelight at the show. Partly, it was the excitement caused by the NexusOne giveway (want to get developers frothing with excitement for hours?Give them a new bit of hardware to play with!). Partly, it was Eric Schmidt's captivating keynote speech, where he laid a clear stake in the ground (and is continuing to do so in Abu Dhabi at the Abu Dhabi Media Show) when it comes to mobile. Simply put, Google is now placing mobile at the centre of its strategy.Could not be clearer than that. Everyone else playing in the yard has been warned!

Mobile World Congress (MWC) First Impressions

BARCELONA-From the capital of all things mobile (at least for one week), here are my first impressions of Day 1 of the MWC.

Firstly, attendance may have dipped slightly compared to previous years, but nothing like what some observers were expecting. What seems to be the case though, is that fewer company staff are actually on the exhibition stands and more hostesses are left to explain the products on display (sometimes to good effect, see NTT DoCoMo stand and sometimes not so good, see Telefonica stand).

Secondly, emphasis has slipped away slightly from content to once again focus on technology..the insistent talk on convergence in terms of devices seems to have stimulated incumbents in the mobile space out of their lethargy and start dishing out new features or devices at a faster rate.

I was particularly impressed by the new LG Arena 3D interface (a la Linux) though its mere 8GB of inbuilt memory are disappointing.

More and more handsets being showcased come with QWERTY keyboards (no surprise) and in my view, within 2 years the majority of new devices being shipped will all come with this keyboard and/or the hasidic iPhone style one.

More later...

Mobile World Congress (MWC)-Expectations in 2009

BARCELONA-The 2009 edition will be the 3rd MWC I will be attending, but am sure that the flavour of this year's event will be quite distinguishable from that of previous editions.

Last year's MWC was undoubtedly the year with the greatest emphasis on mobile content, with the Content Zone area expanding greatly compared to earlier years. It was also the year which marked the foray of new players in the handset market, such as Asus and Garmin.

This year is seems that the organisers have made a more earnest effort to showcase innovation at the event, with greater floor space dedicated to both local and international mobile start-ups. This is absolutely fundamental, as innovation is unlikely to come from the existing incumbents, who are dragged down by declining revenues, limited credit facilities and unhappy shareholders.

But, the mobile marketplace is a complex ecosystem, and innovation will only flourish if most stakeholders make more than just a token effort to support new ideas. Key to this are the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), whose essential support role has been hankered by a blinkered approach to innovation (we want it, but won't risk anything to get it).

Some signs of change are emerging, with MNOs on the acquisition trail for new concepts they understand (view Zyb's acquisition by Vodafone for example). While this buying-in of innovation is great (it supports many an exit strategy documented in start-up business plans) it doesn't per se do much to support the launch of new, daring services (such as LBSs).

My hope for the MWC this year is to see MNOs recognising that opening up their network to innovative startups is not only commendable, but that it is the only way that they can maintain sustainable growth in the mid to long term and drive new users and greater usage to their increasingly core data package offerings.

Mobile World Congress 2008 -Summary

BARCELONA - I'm posting a good wrap-up for the MWC 08 a friend of mine passed on. It is by Dr. Mehmet Unsoy, Partner at Cartagena Capital and offers a good overall view of this year' show:

"Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2008 (aka 3GSM) was held for the third time in Barcelona, Spain, during Feb 11-14, 2008. Organizers claimed that there was a slight increase in the attendance (expected to be over 50,000) and 1,600 companies exhibiting, compared to 1,300 last year. But most of us felt that the attendance was about the same or even slightly lower, maybe because crowds and queues were better managed!

In this Industry Perspectives, I am giving my views and observations below. We also have Jane Zweig offering a rather different perspective on the overall direction of the industry [read article]. Finally, Alan Quayle, as a guest author, describes why he thinks the industry is at the crossroads [read article].

HSPA

The major theme of this congress was mobile broadband. HSPA deployments have really taken off, with 174 commercial HSDPA deployments, 36 of them delivering 7.2 Mbps download speeds. They are targeting 42 Mbps and 12 Mbps for downlink and uplink respectively, using HSPA+/ HSPA Evolved by 2009. These are outstanding data rates! Also significant is that there are currently 420 HSPA enabled mobile devices, including the USB dongles, for laptops. Speaking of laptops, the mobile broadband Notebook competition was won by Dell and ECS, with HSPA embedded notebooks, at $550 price points, which is rather impressive! This HSPA enabled notebook market is estimated to be a $50B global market.

There were lots of talk, presentations and demonstrations on LTE. With the recent uptake of the HSPA based mobile broadband, there seems to be genuine pressure to realize LTE as early as possible. Ericsson, with their strong LTE commitment, demonstrated a first end-to-end phone call using LTE. There were long line-ups to see this Ericsson demo! Ericsson claims that they will have first commercial deployments of LTE by end of 2009. Nortel was also demonstrating LTE, with a target of commercial deployment with Verizon by end of 2009. However, these all sound awfully optimistic. Also, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC announced a major partnership to jointly develop LTE, but a few people I talked to were quite skeptical of such partnerships!

WiMAX

WiMAX was a relatively low-key topic at this show with only a few high-profile demonstrations. Cisco was demonstrating their recently bought Navini gear, which targets primarily the developing markets. However, the most interesting were the discussions/presentations around the relative positioning of WiMAX Mobile and LTE. Several industry leaders, including Vodafone’s CEO Arun Sarin, pushed for LTE making room for WiMAX Mobile, as part of the TDD solution, thus, creating a convergence of WiMAX and LTE. One implication of this is that those operators that deploy WiMAX Mobile in the next 2-3 years, can evolve to be part of LTE by 2010 or later. However, this view is not shared by everyone. China Mobile is collaborating with Vodafone and Verizon on LTE trials, but seems to be pushing TD-SCDMA as the TDD portion of LTE.

A couple of very interesting WiMAX related developments were a “WiMAX on an SD card” by Mitsumi using Sequans chip, showing a high degree of integration and NXP’s dual-mode EDGE-WiMAX reference design. Both of these are important steps in launching WiMAX services. One of the topics we had touched on in a previous “Cartagena Industry Insights” was the possibility of mobile TV over WiMAX and at this congress UDcast announced a mobile TV platform for WiMAX with broadcast and multicast capabilities. Also interesting was the seamless WiMAX - Wi-Fi roaming/ hand-off demo by Alvarion, Comfone and Intel, showing the complementary positioning of these two technologies.

Huawei had an impressive presence at the congress this year with a recent string of European operator successes. I was particularly impressed with the emphasis on “IP transport infrastructure for mobile evolution” for mobile networks. With mobile broadband demanding significant bandwidth and networking, this looks like the right emphasis for Huawei and others.

FEMTOCELLS

I have observed a degree of maturing in the Femtocell companies understanding and responding to the requirements and challenges they are facing. Even though I had been somewhat critical of the Femtocell companies in the recent past, I think they are developing capabilities and solutions to tackle interference issues, remote management, as well as bringing down the unit cost. Several young companies worth to mention here are ip.access, picoChip and Ubiquisys. Also, some companies are looking at merging Femtocell units with other devices at home, such as residential or home gateways.

On the mobile device side, the first surprise of the congress was Microsoft’s announcement of the Danger acquisition for $160M. Lots of people expressed puzzlement around this acquisition and various theories around the motivation of Microsoft and whether it has anything to do with their intended Yahoo acquisition to compete more effectively with Google/ Android/ gPhone, etc. This probably is a separate topic of discussion!

Apple was not really present at the congress, but their presence was felt enormously. First, there were numerous (hundreds of) new handsets announced and most of them with significantly improved “user experience”, some with a touch screen, obviously showing some iPhone and iTouch influence. Nokia announced their Touch UI, but are not sure when it will be available on handsets. SonyEricsson had their first Windows Mobile handset, Xperia X1, which looked superb! It has 9 panels or screens, each catering for different environments. It is not tied to Windows and they could change it to another OS later! With numerous handset announcements, it seems that Sony Ericsson is trying very hard to improve their market-share, currently #4 with 8.8%, after Nokia (38.1%), Samsung (14.5%) and Motorola (13.1%). Also there were lots of rumors about Motorola and what they may do with their handset division.

Incidentally Nokia had one very impressive handset announced, the N96, with 5 Megapixel camera, recording videos at 30 fps, supporting MPEG-4 as well as DVB-H, 16GB memory and microSD slot. But you cannot get your hands on it until Q3 and it would cost you around 550 EUR.

LiMo Foundation announced the first wave of 18 new phones that are Mobile Linux based as well as their SDK strategy. These include handsets from LG, Samsung, Motorola, NEC and Panasonic and some prototypes from Aplix and PurpleLabs. This shows that LiMo can compete effectively with Google’s recently announced Open Handset Alliance (OHA), in offering an open operating system for mobile handsets that is hardware independent. LiMo Foundation needs to be taken more seriously thanks to increased membership recently including companies such as Access, AMD, Broadcom, Ericsson, Huawei, McAfee, Montavista, NXP, Open Plug, Softbank, ST, Trolltech and WindRiver.

Several OHA members such as Qualcomm, TI, ARM, NEC, ST and WindRiver also demonstrated some very early versions of the Android prototype platform. However, it will be late 2008 before any mobile handsets be available with such a platform. It is interesting to note that companies like Wind River are in both LiMo and OHA camps!

With the growing number of video and TV capable handsets, mobile TV is reaching a degree of maturity. There were solutions delivering mobile TV over 3G, HSPA, DVB-H, MediaFlo as well as over Wi-Fi. Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated the new satellite based DVB-HS system, together with DiBcom, Eutelsat, Sagem, SES Astra, TeamCast and UDcast. It was announced that Japan has reached the 20 Million mobile TV phone mark this month after only 2 years in service. New ABI research report predicts that by 2012 the mobile TV market will boast nearly half a billion subscribers. The growth of 3G/ HSPA will be a major factor in this growth.

GREEN ISSUES

Greening of the wireless industry was yet another theme at the congress. Most of the emphasis was in base-stations that used less power, less space, etc. But also, recycling of mobiles and batteries in China, for example, was noteworthy. Greening is particularly important since several countries are experiencing significant mobile penetration growth. China now has over 525M subs, with 39% penetration and 18% y/y growth, the USA has 254M subs, with 87% penetration, India has 237M subs, with 21% penetration and a whooping 60% y/y growth and Russia has 169M subs, with 120% penetration!! Interestingly enough, we observe several European countries with over 100% penetration, led by Italy (154%), followed by U.K. (122%) and Germany (117%).

Even though China and India attract lots of attention as key developing markets, the African market is experiencing the highest rate of growth these days. There are about 270M subs today in various African countries and most countries are experiencing over 60% annual growth with blended ARPU being around 10 EUR. We should expect all sorts of new solutions targeting such a growth market, but with a low ARPU.

MOBILE ADVERTISING

Mobile advertising was still a hot topic in this show, with over 30 companies (maybe more!) offering various solutions, some end-to-end, some partial, for this potentially explosive area. The global advertising market is considered to be about $640B and there is lots of debate as to what percentage of this can be expected to be shifted to mobile. Also, if X% is shifted from print or on-line to the mobile medium, it would be worth substantially more due to better targeting and higher response rates. Analysts estimate the mobile ad market as $12B by 2011. Several industry collaborations also announced during this congress, showing that the mobile operators are taking this more seriously and are attempting to regulate themselves. They are starting to realize that rich media mobile content delivery will have to rely on an advertising based business model as opposed to a simple subscription based model if it is going to succeed.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Social Networking was also a hot topic at the congress, with Facebook’s and MySpace’s initiatives in the mobile area attracting lots of attention. But also RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie emphasized that Blackberry’s future depends on business-oriented social networking. Mobile phones are becoming so much better tool for generating user generated content (UGC). Thus, mobile becomes such an important part of social networking. Analysts are expecting 600 Million active users for mobile social networks by 2012.

Mobile VoIP deployments have taken off partially due to mobile broadband deployments around the globe. Most of the mobile VoIP deployments are said to be mobile operator-friendly, i.e. conducted in collaboration with the mobile operators. VCC (Voice Call Continuity) solutions are now available for hand-offs between mobile and Wi-Fi networks. There is also a strong element of social networking in the XoIP service deployments.

GPS

Increased penetration of GPS integrated handsets is now enabling a series of interesting Location Based Services. Nokia and Navteq had various product announcements. Yahoo announced oneConnect that alerts you when friends are in town. It also aggregates social network connections from Facebook, MySpace, etc. and delivers your email!

There were a lot of interesting companies worth to mention at the show, but I can only highlight a few of them:

• Aepona – won the best service delivery platform award
• GestureTek – most innovative application with its gesture recognition technology for mobile gaming and navigational software
• Valimo Wireless – mobile signature and user authentication and one of the finalists for most innovative consumer applications
• myGamma.com – best mobile social networking service

Finally, the Mobile World Congress is becoming less and less mobile operator centric. However, there is a need for further openness. Google, Apple and other internet players are at the gate and they should be invited and given a more active role at the future MWCs."

Mobile World Congress 2008 -10 Days to Go

BARCELONA -Slowly but surely, Barcelona is coming alive with the buzz of mobilists from across the globe as anticipation for the Mobile World Congress heightens.

This year promises to be bigger and better than prior events, with around 70,000 participants expected to crowd the local scene and several billion of dollars worth of deals to be sealed during intense activity from the 11-14th February.

Plenty of great companies, personalities and seminars are expected, and I'll be casting my eye over the packed agenda to highlight some key events.

A couple of seminars have so far grabbed my attention :

On Tuesday 12th Feb, 16.15-17.45 in Hall 5 there is the Moving from Search to Discovery Seminar, with Dan Olschwang from JumpTap and Steve Boom from Yahoo, looking at " What's the Business Case for Mobile Search?" and "Taking Internet Search Mobile".

On Wednesday 13th Feb, 16.30-18.00 in Hall 5 there is the Social Networking Seminar, with Jed Stremel from Facebook, where they will be addressing juicy questions like:"What Will Be the Killer Mobile Social Networking Application" and "How Mobile Can Change the Social Networking Phenomena".

Next, I'll be taking a look at some of the innovative companies that will be at MWC so that you can add them to your watchlist...watch this space...