by Marie-Paule Odini, Chief Technologist, Communications and Media Solutions, HP.
I was amazed again this year by the number of people attending MWC: more than 60,000 people, device vendors, operators, developers, IT and equipment vendors. All the main industry actors converge to Barcelona to promote their latest technology and talk new business models: so much information for 4 days!
Actually it was good that HP did its Think Beyond WebOS conference just before MWC on Feb9th, at least I had time to watch the live video and see the devices, because in Barcelona the HP booth was so packed with people wanting to see the HP Veer, Pre3 and TouchPad devices that I could not approach!
AppPlanet focusing on mobile applications and developers was bigger than last year. 45,000 visitors and 12,000 of them developpers. I did attend the WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) developer’s conference where CEOs from the 68 member companies, global operators, device, IT, equipment and application vendors presented the newly released WAC2.0. Leveraging HTML5 and W3C widgets, WAC offers a set of API and an SDK that offers a unified development interface for developers across devices: camera, accelerometer API etc. Smart decision to start with a device API layer to seduce developers! Next release will include networking API (location, sms etc). Developers were thrilled, tired to have to choose a device vendor and be locked with it, or have to develop their applications multiple times for different devices, and HTML5 seems to be the alternative to closed Apple like environments. The Korean operators lead the way, along with LG and have decided to deploy WAC, HP was actually lucky to be selected to provide this KWAC solution. Next day was the HP WebOS developer’s conference, so full that some developers could not attend. Such a big enthousiasm around WebOS !
Overall the talks were very much around mobile adoption worldwide, 5.3billion users worldwide and a huge growth in Asia and some developing countries. Mobile data traffic still doubling every year in most countries, density in the cities seen as one of the top subjects, leading to LTE deployment need. So lots of talks about LTE! TD-LTE was kind of new: China Mobile has adopted this technology, now being followed by India and Japan, also interested to leverage Wimax spectrum with this technology ! When we see that China and India have each more than 3 times more mobile users than the US, or Europe, it gives some perspective on the impact on new technologies ! TD-LTE could likely move to Europe too where ITS spectrum could be leveraged … Small modular programmable BTS were also the hot subject of the week, starting with the LightRadio, this beautiful translucid ‘Cube’ next gen base station announced by ALU along with HP and Freescale, supporting 2G, 3G or 4G, and leveraging Cloud infrastructure.
Besides devices, appstore and infrastructure, the other popular topic was M2M. David Boswarthick from ETSI did a great job setting up the stage with the presentation of ETSI 1st M2M standard release, defining system requirements and eluding to M2M standard architecture. Today the market is very fragmented and device vendors use proprietary platforms. The objective is to open up interfaces and define ‘standard’ interface between devices and the element management platform and then open API to the applications. Opening up the opportunity to application developers for many verticals: smart metering, automotive, health etc. I got the chance to participate in a panel for Telecom TV with Abhi from AT&T and Jonathan from Ernst&Young talking about M2M where we shared our views and experience, very interesting and amazingly aligned view on this business and the role of the operators, trying to move away from just selling SIM cards at discounted price to sell M2M solutions and manage this ecosystem of fragmented M2M vendors. A real revenue generating business today for AT&T for instance!
NFC (near field communication) is another subject that was highly visible. Badges this year where NFC enabled by NXP! I saw business cards NFC enabled, badges, smart cards and telephones! many use case applications from transportation to retail.
Last but not least, developing countries! huge demographic growth, huge mobile adoption growth ! m-health, education, social networking with twitter for the masses, or facebook SMS enabled for low end devices or 2G networks. Smartphones are very popular, however there are still just 15% of total mobile devices. The rest is more basic phones, cheap phones to address the 1billion people that do not even have a bank account , but have a phone ! And we’ve seen with recent actuality how important this can be!
So long life to Mobile World Congress, back in Barcelona next year before moving to an other country!
