Mobile World Congress 2010: Did You Survive?

Was Mobile World Congress quieter this year? Not according to the official stats or my aching feet, hands and vocal chords resulting from an extremely busy and fruitful schedule of meetings during the show.

What was very much apparent during the show and echoed by Rob Conway, Head of the GSM Association (which runs MWC) is that 2010 will be the “year of the developer”.

This was firmly established on day one when I picked up the MWC Show Daily and saw the launch of The Wholesale Applications Community which aims to make it easier for developers to build and sell apps “irrespective of device or technology”. However, with so many industry consortiums launched in the past that have aimed to deliver similar benefits (with several of the same members); I am interested in how they will convince developers this will work.

Another key announcement that caught my eye was the launch of Windows Mobile 7 which saw several of the key features being showcased during the event. With some of the technical details and the availability of the handsets being somewhat vague, as well as whether developers will need to recode existing Windows content for the platform, I wondered whether The Guardian was correct in stating that Microsoft may have “pressed the launch button a little early”.

Despite both announcements not quite offering the full story, they both provide further support to the crucial role that mobile (and therefore mobile developers) will play across a range of industries in the year ahead. I’ll be watching both with interest in the coming months and as always welcome any views you may have on these announcements.

Finally, we did manage to have some fun at Mobile World Congress between meetings with the new office Flip which we plan to start using increasingly at events we attend.

Apart from the team interviewing myself about our own announcements at the show (see below), we also took the opportunity to talk to some of our customers and partners during the event and plan to post them in the coming weeks.

SEE ’09: The World of Symbian

With my previous post talking about Gartner’s prediction that Symbian will continue to dominate the OS market for the foreseeable future, I was extremely interested to hear the views of our UK team who were exhibiting at the Symbian Exchange & Exposition earlier this week. Having attended in previous years, how did this show compare and what was making the headlines (apart from our Symbian Virtual Developer Lab announcement)?

Rather than live vicariously through my team, please find below my very first guest post:

When first walking into the show you cannot help but imagine you have entered a Dr. Seuss book, with cartoon pop-ups located around various meeting points at the show. However once you had moved past the cows with jet packs, the Loch Ness monster and a toaster with a light bulb shooting out of it, you quickly realised you were instead in the world of Symbian.

Regardless of the more business-like nature of the show, there was still that familiar feeling of excitement which slowly developed (excuse the pun) throughout the day. Attendees quickly found the free massage service, coffee bars and fully water submersible handset demos that were available and spirits were at a high at the evening event held in the Science Museum.

So, what was this world like? The world of Symbian was notably smaller than previous years, with fewer exhibitors and smaller “big brand” stands being evident from the moment you walked through the door. Other companies had selected to not have an open stand, for example Accenture, but instead boasted dedicated meeting rooms in which to conduct their business.

Symbian had also chosen to step-up education at the show, with more keynotes and seminars taking place than any other year. A significant main stage was complimented by a series of “topic rooms” where particular issues of interest to the community were discussed, for example Open Source Business Models and Handset Creation.

Although the above observations are a sign of the current economic climate, I also think this was evidence of the changing demands from attendees. People want to know how to make money out of the content and services they are developing. Symbian want to educate them on how they can work with developers to achieve this.

If I could summarise the show in one picture this would be it.

The Symbian ideas board was busy throughout the day with people making suggestions on how Symbian could be improved.

Thanks for taking the time to write the post guys and some interesting observations about how the show has changed since I last attended. So what did you think of the show? Also, check out some more behind-the-scenes pictures on our Flikr channel.