As I said yesterday, my MWC experience got cut short by some stomach fun, but I have managed to collect some thoughts on the event.
– Damn, it’s big. I’ve been going to this event for several years now, stretching back to the Cannes days, and it just keeps getting bigger. I’m not sure that’s such a good thing, though, and I wonder how long it is before the gear makers get siphoned off to some other event or locale (Dubai, for its proximity to emerging markets, ventures Ian Wood) and the rest of us are left in Barcelona, or all venture our own separate ways to more narrowly targeted affairs.
– Perhaps as a result of the scale and wide reach of the show, there wasn’t any big story or announcement that everybody was talking about. Nokia’s new devices got some buzz the first day, but that almost seemed by default — it wasn’t because people were blown away by them, just because there wasn’t much to rival them. The “there’s not a lot to see” line was taken by a decent number of folks, but that didn’t seem to come with any resentment, as people were still enjoying the discussions and networking with all the other folks that turned up.
– Where were the operators? They weren’t very visible. This struck me as perhaps another sign of their disintermediation, and combined with the above point, further illustrates that the innovation in this industry isn’t going to come from legacy telco thinking or through its traditional channels.
– The Mobile Monday Peer Awards on, er, Monday, were a good time (even if proceedings did drag on a bit). I was impressed by several of the companies that presented, including Buzzd and Funambol.
– I picked up a SIM from Spanish MVNO Yoigo at the recommendation of Martin Sauter’s useful Prepaid Wireless Internet Access wiki, with the 1.30 euro or so max daily data rate looking tasty. But just like Martin, I found the network performance abysmal, with it disappearing for hours on end. Also, am I being overly optimistic in expecting SMS interconnect to not be an issue in 2008? SMS sent to UK networks never arrived, as did messages sent to other Yoigo users while their phones were off. Messages sent to my SO in the US arrived, but her responses didn’t.
That’s most of what I got from my limited experience — if you’ve got more to add or anything to share of your own, the comments are all yours.
I felt much the same way - lots to see, but nothing really big. I was expecting to see / hear more about about android and the next iphone killer… but i guess its too early for both?
I posted some daily summaries of my experience at WMC 08 on my blog and have been posting some short video no different products that grabbed my attention: http://www.burningthebacon.com
I agree, MWC was much more about quantity than quality this year.
Some innovations in hardware (MODU, iMate VGA/Video out with Windows Mobile) and lots of clones of the same concepts software wise, especially in middleware.
Funambol is something different for their open source approach. Maybe it’s time for some coordination between mobile open source efforts?
Living in Madrid I can say Yoigo performance is usually great but they didn’t expect (too bad for them, it was a nice opportunity) that the data-hungry mobile users of MWC were going to collapse their network (the only one in spain with good data tarrifs, now joined by the one month young Symio).