Mobile World Conference 2010 - Betapond ramblings

MWC 2010 was very interesting. The usual industry players were all there as expected from the low level chip designers and network infrastructure guys to the handset manufacturers and operators. I particularly enjoyed the NTT DoCoMo stand - watching the poor guy who had to demo the eye controlled headphones ALL DAY.

For me there were three key themes that I saw recurring again and again. Cloud services, Social Networking and App stores. Hardly surprising I suppose but I missed the show last year and the last time I was there the industry was touting IMS and a walled garden service model. Seems that they really have woken up - not that they really had any choice. I suppose it was fairly obvious that a service model built on top of http and an open approach would win over the complex and obfuscated IMS and SIP servlet model.

As a case in point I was over at the Motorolla stand, a company that has seen its fair share of problems in the recent past. Their latest handset offering - dubbed Moto Blur - puts social networking content in prime position on the front screen of the device, the offering comes with a feed aggregation system that harvests status updates from twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc and provides a single feed to the device in the interests of network bandwidth.

There were a number of start-ups at the show many of them focused around the provision of cloud and social based services to mobile. I was particularly impressed by myphonehas who have a recommendations engine for apps that is based off the apps that your contacts use. A neat idea I think and one that could of course be applied beyond the scope of apps.

Returned with the usual stack of leaflets, business cards and slight headache…

Peter