Mobile World Congress 2010 Agenda Planning in Barcelona

BARCELONA -The coming week in Barcelona is set to be as buzzing and intense as ever during Mobile World Congress time, with an agenda packed chock-full of seminars, development days, meetings, parties, PR stunts and more.

The key to success as always will be to pre-select and prioritise carefully which events to attend (there are simply too many good ones to attend, unless you happen to have a body clone out there!) . This will depend on personal and company preferences and your specific objectives for the event. I recommend jotting down between 3-5 things you want to take away from the show (and side-events) and then matching that to your planned timetable. Is your key objective to learn about open development environments but have no time booked in to learn about Android? It could be worth re-jigging your agenda.

A few events on my agenda so far:

Innovation Exchange 2010

I've been invited to take part in a Panel Discussion at the Innovation Exchange 2010 (Applications & Monetization) event hosted by Qtel with support from the GSMA and MEF on the 13th\14th of February at the Hotel Skipper.

Social Media Round Table

I'll also be taking part in a Social Media Round Table discussion on Monday 15th February hosted by ACS at the Gran Marina to talk about "Capturing the Power of Social Media to Revolutionize the Customer Experience"

App Planet

I'm looking forward to the App Planet event in Hall 7 at the Mobile World Congress on Weds February 17th where SonyEricsson will have a 'Creation Day' for developers. The Xperia X10 Android device has had some rave reviews, so I'm interested to see whether developers are excited about generating content for it.

WIP Jam

The WIP Jam session at the Congress (registration now closed) on the 18th will feature a discussion panel on Augmented Reality applications and will help answer the question of whether the hype is justified. As AR is a hot topic, this is an unmissable session (more info here).

TechCrunch Europe

Finally, there is the Techcrunch event on the 17th Feb (offsite from the Congress) featuring Ilja Laurs of GetJar amongst others, and bringing investors and start-ups together (more info here).

I'll also be exhibiting in the Innovation Zone of the MWC at the GeoMe Stand: if you're a blog reader and you're at the fair or one of the other events, come and say hello! If you can't find me, send me a tweet @ricferraro.

Kevin Kelly Highlights Persistence Paradox of Social Networks

Kevin Kelly, who I previously covered in a blog post on his 'The One' vision, recently highlighted on his own site the results of researcher Bernardo Huberman, now at HP Labs of what is defined as the 'Persistence Paradox'.

Apparently:

"People persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from YouTube revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, with the likelihood of success less than that of playing a lottery."

The conclusion suggests that increasing uploads improves quality but not hits.

Unfortunately, the paper does not examine the issue of photo uploads, and any link between number of uploads and user motivation/success in achieving his goals.

Had it done so, it may have offered some useful insights for Facebook, now the world's second largest online repository of photos after ImageShack (with 20bn images). Techcrunch recently reported that it has earmarked $100m to buy servers-with $30m spent this year alone with storage provider NetApp.

All of this just as relevant for pure play mobile social networks though on a lower scale-while uploading of photos from mobile is fairly standard, upload speeds for photos (let alone videos) mean data volumes still remain relatively low.

Plugg-Dopplr and Google to present on European innovation

Brussels-Plugg is a one-day conference on March 12th in Brussels with a clear focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and raising global awareness for those European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field that stand out in the crop.

Plugg aims to provide a hands-on view on what's happening in Europe, what the continent's (dis)advantages are compared to other regions and what the future will hold for its digital industry.

This year, Robin Wauters has assembled a great line-up of speakers, including Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK, Lisa Sounier from Dopplr and Anil Hansjee from Google.

There is also the Start-up Rally for web and mobile start-ups with European roots where innovative new players can showcase their wares.

The first 3 readers to register via my blog (blog code AW6TZ24U) get 10% off the ticket price-don't miss out!