Hugh Spear's Blog

Mobile World Congress 2011 - take-aways

MWC 2011 Starters

This must be something like fourteen years of visiting this show in either Cannes or Barcelona and each time I try to justify the event to myself as something worth doing.  Some years the justification came from seeing the progress of the technology and trying to identify what we would need to do to keep up. Other years it was just to see which themes looked like dominating the industry.  Now it seems to be more the practical value of being able to meet with so many important contacts in one place during one week. I just hope that someone kept hold of the list of 'Next Steps'!

The items below are the things which I took away from the show this year. For me it was worth the time, cost and effort to attend, and I'm already looking forward to next year's show.

Maturation of Wholesale SMS supply

One of the two themes which for me seemed to re-emerge regularly during the week was the movement towards open cooperation between some of the larger and better established SMS Aggregators in the world.   There appeared to be agreement that worldwide SMS connectivity was becoming a regular requirement for many global businesses; and that the job of providing this was difficult to do successfully. There is now a core collection of companies that are already working together, have enough integrity to only promise what they can deliver and are poised to provide a global network of SMS connections.   Unfortunately, there are also a number of companies which damage the reputation of SMS aggregators by being less than honest about how they carry out their SMS routing and focussing on price without regard to service quality. My hope is that over the next year or so, we will see more transparency come to this market and that this will lead to some more sustainable and loyal revenue streams.

The need for an eco-system

This is the second theme which has become apparent in many areas of IT, but almost more so in mobile. One could argue that one of the primary reasons for the success of the iPhone is the quality of it's eco-system. iTunes for music, the App store for games and widgets to do almost any task. The simplicity of the purchasing experience which rewards developers, the huge industry of additional hardware which enhances the iPhone; from protective screen covers to high quality speaker systems.  The success which the iPhone brings to creative artists, application developers and hardware manufacturers means that anyone who wants to unseat the iPhone as the dominant smartphone has to do a lot more than just provide a cute handset.  

In the past the mobile networks thought that their role was to provide the eco-system of value added services and all they wanted out of a handset was something cute which had good signal strength and battery life.  The reality is that the mobile networks were not good enough or focussed enough to provide an eco-system which worked for all the participants, and this has enabled Apple and to a lesser extent Google to step in. 

The great news is that Apple provides a fantastic case study for other's to follow if they want to achieve dominance in their own field.  Many at the show now recognise this, but they don't have Steve Jobs at hand so we will have to see how well they can learn from the iPhone and apply the lessons.

Top 5 Personal MWC 2011 Awards

My own personal awards for MWC 2011 are as follows.

1. Biggest distraction - CBOSS Girls.

Whatever CBOSS do seems less important than how their stand looks. Their stand is a white stage and on the stage stands attractive women wearing less than the February weather really required. Everyone seemed to have visited the stand and many seemed to linger, but no-one seemed to know anything about the company or its products, or if it has products. 

2. Biggest attraction LG Optimus.

The LG Optimus is billed as the worlds first 3D mobile phone. It is fair to say that there were some beta software glitches, but overall this was a fantastic device and one has to congratulate LG for innovation within the hardware and showing that there is more to the world than just an eco-system.  The games were better and the movies more engaging when shown in 3D. It even has a twin lense camera to enable users to make their own 3D movies. 

3. Best Story to overshadow the show - Nokia and Microsoft.

Coming just days ahead of the show this was always going to be the big story. I bet that the other handset manufacturers running Windows Mobile 7 were a bit miffed and it probably damaged their commercial prospects at the show.

But really this could be the most important story of the decade. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can recreate the success it had with the Xbox rather than labour on through more and more iterations of Windows; and whether Nokia can concentrate on hardware and communications engineering and be a little less Finnish. But if these companies can pull it off then the world will be a better place. 

4. Best Buzzwords.

If you have an LTE Cloud Computing App that raises ARPU year on year and comes with its own eco-system then you have got it made.

5. Most conspicuous absence. Moble Content

Whatever did happen to mobile phone personalisation? My view is that this is now included in the handset eco-system. So it is purchased from iTunes or its equivalent, comes via an App or is just retrieved through a browser. The opportunities for independent vendors seem to be reducing.

 

 

GSM World 2009 - just another iPhone beauty pageant

Forewarned is forearmed

I went to GSM World in Barcelona in 2007 and the person who picked my pocket bought a motorbike with my credit card! This year, I vowed, it would be different. I am now back in Sydney having made it there and back without being robbed, unless you count the cafe prices!

Captains Log

So what was there to report on you might be wondering? Well in 2007 the biggest story was of a company which didn't exhibit and their product which wasn't available. The company was Apple and the product, you've guessed it, was the iPhone. Everyone laughed that the biggest story wasn't even bothering to turn up. Well this year again we have the most obvious biggest story as the iPhone again, and again no Apple.  It is the biggest story now, not because the iPhone product has changed but because everyone else has piled in to join the 'me too' tribute.

For example this handset from Toshiba, the TG01 is a pretty nice looking device. Toshiba will bring all of their production qualities to the product that they have developed from their other businesses. But it can't be said that that they haven't at least nodded a debt to the iPhone in terms of industrial design.

Even Nokia with their 8800 seemed to be trying a bit too hard to have an iPhone.
Though as the photo shows, just when you thought it was a complete wannabee out pops a stylus and you start thinking of the P900! Especially once you look at the handwriting recognition.

Such was the desperation to have an iPhone that some manufacturers even employed designers to make their models a bit too close to the real thing. Why I wonder did Huawei make us delete all our photos of their touch-screen phone? Well we didn't let some strong arm tactics stop us getting the photo as you can see.

And Sony Ericsson seemed to be reaching a point of full convergence in an attempt to beat off the opposition in one fell swoop.

Their new handset the iDou  has 12.1 mega pixels of camera power, plus flash, something looking like a PSP in terms of user interface, touch screen super powered Walkman with oodles of memoery, oh and a phone.So whereas Mr Jobs from Apple wanted to merge an iPod, a Phone and the Internet into the iPhone; Sony Ericsson want to emphasise much more the multi-media player aspects of what they have. It does appear to be everything including the kitchen sink and I did hear a couple of commentators wondering if it smacked of desperation. Either way it will be a must-have toy for recreational users, so long as the battery life holds up.

So if everyone has an iPhone clone or at least something which may one day come off the production line rather than the 'artists impression'  drawing board, then how are we going to tell the difference between these devices? Well by the quality of their applications I hear you reply. Quite so, so that is the reason all have an App store. Pity the poor developer trying to support his or her application across so many environments. Makes you wonder whether there is a business in writing a runtime environment which works over each operating environment - but that would be java and probably not a wheel anyone wants to reinvent. Maybe web apps are the way forward?

One conclusion we can draw from this severe case of  "imitation being the sincerest form of flattery" is that the Mobile Internet is now very much a reality and whereas people only went there from old phones in small numbers, the iPhone has seen to it that people not only want to go there, but in some cases don't need to go there with any other kind of device. That is at least one bit of great news for Dialogue and its fabulous Mobile Site Builder. That has iPhone optimisation and I expect will be optimised for all these other devices once they hit our streets. Then you can really have a build once strategy and an easy life.