I recently returned from a business trip to Europe as part of which I attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In spite of the challenges associated with travelling on British Airways and American, it was a good trip and I managed to hook up with quite a few of my contacts from the industry while there.  

Of course we all spent a couple of days jostling with the other 50,000 people that were attending and considerable time seemed to be spent by a lot of attendees coordinating rendezvous points and actually finding each other.   One of the central themes of the conference this year was mobile broadband access with lots of talk around the success of HSDPA, which said to be delivering download speeds of 7.2Mb – Albeit that this is probably in conditions with a low volume of users, camped a few feet from the base station! 

Also, how quickly this will evolve &/or be replaced by HSPA/+ and LTE –With several demos of LTE from the leading infrastructure vendors there was a lot of talk about when this would become a commercial reality and how it would play against mobile Wi-Max. My own belief is that mobile Wi-Max is likely to be a relative niche play, with service providers who adopt this technology, finding it a tough challenge to win over customers from the traditional mobile operators – Though Google and others could of course turn this on it’s head. 

Related to the broadband theme, there was of course a lot of talk and hype around the latest devices, many of which seemed to be a response to apple’s I-phone – With lots of new touch screen and video enabled devices that looked very similar. Other themes that drew a lot of interest included mobile advertising and related applications – With a lot of focus on location based solutions, video/TV and social networking – Also femtocell technology. The former representing a $600B opportunity and the latter the potential for seamless/integrated broadband (family) access that can help offload potentially skyrocketing bandwidth demands on existing mobile infrastructure.

Given the themes of the conference and surrounded by thousands of industry people like myself, all equipped with the latest gadgets and endeavoring to co-ordinate with colleagues and contacts that they couldn’t find. It struck me that the organizers &/or participants should provide a location-based meeting service – Enabling attendees to find each other quickly and efficiently while reducing the considerable leg-work involved in navigating back and forth across the vast conference campus.

I will have to give this some more thought and welcome any comments on delivering a web-conferencing service that can be used for all such events around the globe!

Until next time - Hasta la vista!

 Peter