By Morgan E
The vast majority of people may associate the month of February with Valentine’s Day and Shrove Tuesday – but for anybody who’s anybody in the mobile industry, February is all about three little words: Mobile World Congress. Held annually in Barcelona, MWC (as it is more commonly referred to) gathers together the great and the good of the industry, creating a forum for debate, discussion and analysis of the current state of the mobile market and the key trends affecting it.
The global financial crisis had a significant impact on last year’s show. The uncertainty of the recession was the prevailing theme, with the industry considering how to drive revenue streams from existing products and services while curtailing new investments. Fast forward twelve months and while the recession is by no means a distant a memory, MWC 2010 was brimming with confidence, optimism and innovation.
This general feeling that the industry has effectively ridden out the worst of the recession was only slightly reflected in the attendance figures, however (up marginally from 47,000 last year to 49,000 this year). While these numbers are certainly encouraging from the point of view of the GSMA, the time may perhaps have come to stop measuring the success of an event by footfall alone. One client remarked to me that a benefit of companies cutting the number of employees attending the show was that there had been a significant increase in the quality of attendees – those that were there genuinely needed to be there. Furthermore, those who did attend were there to do business, rather than merely collecting brochures and business cards destined for the bin. This too was backed up by another client stating that they had conducted a record number of customer meetings (200 in total) – this truly is an excellent example of the importance of quality over quantity.
Attendance aside, the following topics dominated this year’s show:
• Applications: the apps market is booming and every player in the ecosystem wants a piece of the action. The announcement of the Wholesale Applications Community, a collaborative initiative between leading operators including AT&T and Verizon Wireless to build an open source platform accessible to all mobile phone users, promises much. That said, scepticism of how effectively it will deliver on its potential was almost as loud as the buzz surrounding the announcement itself
• Network congestion: the rise of smartphones and the explosion of mobile broadband continues to test the limits of operators’ infrastructure – given the impact which mobile data overload poses to the end-user experience, this is surely one issue which must be resolved sooner rather than later if mobile technologies are to continue to evolve
• Emerging markets: for the vast majority of countries in this bracket, the mobile platform remains the primary access technology to the internet. As mobile device penetration reaches saturation point in developed markets, delivering a high-quality mobile internet experience to users in the emerging markets will be essential
Can’t wait until next year.
