Mobile World Congress 2011
It’s that time of year again, when the mobile industry converges on Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress 2011 conference and expo.
I'll be there with the rest of the BlueVia team, and below you can find a brief summary of our plans for the week. If you want to learn more about what BlueVia can offer or if you have an app you want to get in front of 80 million customers, come and find us and have a chat.
Sunday 13th February
@josevalles49 will be at Mobile Sunday
Monday 14th February
11:30 I'll be speaking on a panel discussing “Making App's Smarter’ in (Hall 5 Auditorium 2)
11:30 @leevyashim will be presenting BlueVia at the Wholesale Applications Community Developer Event (ADC Auditorium 1 - Hall 7)
From 11:30 for the whole day @davilagrau will be on hand to demo BlueVia at the Wholesale Applications Community Developer Event Be sure to drop by and pick up some BlueVia freebies.
From 15:00 @josevalles49 @jamesparton and @leevyashim will be at the Mobile Premier Awards
At 17:00 @rmelmun will be speaking on an Operator API panel at the Wholesale Applications Community Developer Event
In the evening I'll be at the MEF Connects event
Tuesday 15th February
10:00 @leevyashim and @davilagrau will be demo’ing Telefonica’s integration into WAC on the WAC Stand (Hall 7 at 7C82)
Wednesday 16th February
10:00 @leevyashim and @davilagrau will be demo’ing Telefonica’s integration into WAC on the WAC Stand (Hall 7 at 7C82)
14:00 @davilagrau will be demo’ing Bluevia on the Java Stand (App Planet - Stand 7C18)
19:30 The whole team will be hanging out at the WIP Carnival of Nations Developer Party. Be sure to stop by for one of the free BlueVia cocktails on offer ;-)
Thursday 17th February
Shaking off the hangover’s from the night before,
09:30 @josevalles49 @davilagrau @leevyashim will be at the all day WIP Jam
10:00 @leevyashim will be demo’ing Telefonica’s integration into WAC on the WAC Stand (Hall 7 at 7C82)
11:00 @davilagrau will be demo’ing Bluevia on the Java Stand (App Planet - Stand 7C18)
I look forward to seeing you there, and don’t forget the cocktails!
Mobile Premier Awards 2010
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Apologies in advance that my wrap up of the event is not complete. A scheduling conflict unfortunately meant that I had to leave before the end of the formal agenda.
I'm sure that the official round up of the event and publication of all the winners will be live on the MPA website soon, plus you can look for Twitter activity from the event on it's two hash tags that seemed to be in most frequent use: #mpa and #mpa10 . The venue had no cellular coverage again this year hint hint Rudy ;-) so only the lucky few on WiFi were tweeting from the room.
This wrap up is therefore in the bite sizes pieces that I would have tweeted if I was online at the time!
Russell Buckley from AdMob and Rich Wong from Accel Partners gave the keynotes. I came in too late to do justice to Russell's presentation, but Rich gave some important perspective, sprinkled with a little nostalgia. You can grab Rich's slides here.
Rich rightly pointed out that there has never been a more exciting time to be in the mobile space. Just 10 years ago there were no high speed mobile data networks, actually no real data networks of any note regardless of speed, and phones were only just coming out of the grey scale age with the first colour phones appearing in 2002. I then started a mini personal flashback to my days of launching MMS with O2 UK, and the awe that the arrive of the little Sony Ericsson T68 brought - colour screen, java, MMS, clip on camera - that little thing, quickly followed by the T68i, was a turning point for the industry.
Rich then spoke about Smartphone growth driving new services and presenting a platform for innovative startup's to really florish, saying that he believed the ingredients were now all there for a new Google or eBay sized company to emerge. Of course he rightly pointed out that geography is hugely important, and in emerging markets the feature phone and Nokia still dominate.
Rich took the opportunity to play back the demise of the walled garden of the Mobile Operator portals, with mobile now following the trend we saw on fixed Internet - Google now being the number 1 mobile site for traffic.
He then moved on to an interesting Alien vs Predator analogy to describe the hardware and O/S war in mobile over the past 10 years.
Alien vs Predator #1: Nokia vs Microsoft
Alien vs Predator #2: Nokia vs Asia (ref Sharp's Voda Live devices)
Alien vs Predator #3: Apple vs The Droids
I guess the interesting there is the future relevance of Nokia.
Finally Rich wrapped up with some pearls for start up's (see his deck for the accurate playback), but the bullets were:
- Describe the problem statement clearly
- Team background and credibility
- Platform and distribution strategy
- Stay capital efficient
- Work with investors that have an in-depth understanding of your space
Diversifying O2 Litmus away from pure mobile
In the first major interview of 2010 with paidContent:UK, I hinted at some of our upcoming plans.
A key foundation of our strategy is to broaden our appeal to the web developer community by making available web compatible tools, and by bringing through new innovative features and offers. This strategy actually is not so new. A kind of hidden feature of O2 Litmus is that you do not actually have to upload a native mobile application to be featured in the Litmus catalogue. It is possible to publish a simple URL to your web service which is then sent via SMS to the customers phone.
As mobile browsers become more sophisticated, I predict a huge increase in browser based services for mobile. The browser environment brings two key benefits:
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To use the URL feature, sign into O2 Litmus with a valid developer account. Click on "My Apps" on the Litmus toolbar, then pick "launch an app" . Complete the required fields for the publication process, simply inputting your web address in the "Enter your URL" field, rather than uploading native app files.
Building on this diversification we have made available the SDK for the O2 Joggler device, representing a new category of connected home devices. O2 is very keen to tap into developer innovation to drive forward the Joggler story.
An accompanying Joggler SDK FAQ has also been published, and feel free to ask anything that is not covered.
Finally, we have confirmed our first batch of sponsorships for 2010. I'd encourage you to check out these events and support them:
- It increases the appeal of the mobile opportunity to the web developer community, and brings to ubiquity of the web to mobile
- It help address some of the fragmentation issues developers face, as you do not have to pick a mobile operating system to write a native app for.
