Mobile world Congress 2008, Barcelona 13-16 February 2008

The round-up of the show
Summary from a hula-hoop party you cannot afford to miss with clips from the blogosphere :

. Telecoms industry is hot as ever,
. Mobile broadband happens fast,
. Voice, video and services move to the web,
. Browser-based multimedia devices create demand,
. Mobile industry loves content more than ever

Telecoms is as hot as ever, despite a colder weather in Barcelona
With Victor Donselaar, Movial Applications at Nokia party
There is optimism this year : the industry is rich despite what we hear, there are still enough revenues to keep operators healthy. Encouraging to see 55,000 visitors (+3,000 from last year) as we were told fearing downturn in the telecom industry. Big deals also : on Valentine’s day Robert Murdoch made a dating approach to Yahoo! Microsoft acquired Danger, they did not put a value but rumors was that they paid 500M$ to get a mobile X-box (200% the investments of VCs). Numbers and quality of parties wer also up. Nokia in the harbor wins for the music, Sofinova in the monastery for the good ideas , Accel Partners for the architecture, Ramblas Digital for the best event survivors and. Mobile Jam and Mobile Sunday & Mondays for the best side-events. And if you prefer the large crowds at the fair so much, you could stayed in Hall 6, for an official opening party.

Advance of the mobile broadband bit pipe
There is acceleration of 3.5G deployments with 174 HSDPA implementations worldwide. Vodafone announced HSDPA+ with 42Mb/s download. Nortel announced an LTE joint-venture with Alcatel-Lucent and demonstrated a LTE base station prototype and Ericsson announced trials. China Mobile and Vodafone also announced LTE trials. LTE demo equipment shrunk from computer racks last year to board-size and specifications of 700 Mb/s were advanced. At the conference, ETSI warned not to repeat the 3G-UMTS over-selling roll-out too early as ITU has not yet started the 4G process.

WiMAX was pushed by Intel and Cisco, with somewhat more modest claims on range and speed as last year. There were activities to stimulate the eco-system but there little demand of market traction, except for Sprint roll-out. WiMAX vs. LTE could give operators a difficult CAPEX decisions in 2009.

Voice, video and beyond : change fast !
With the network becoming a fat but dumb pipe, the dramatic change of business models was highlighted by Softbank mobile CEO Masayoshi Son’s keynote. He claimed that 2008 is the year of the internet machine. The main message is that it is not about voice anymore and all about data services. Softbank sacrificed voice ARPU by offering free VoIP services to all subscribers. Japan 3.5G and smart-phone adoption makes it possible to provide richer content. Softbank alliance Yahoo! is a good model of the MNO of the future. They have a networked base business and add personalized value to Yahoo!

Inaki Amate, GM at Fjord creating delicious user experiences

Also at the at the awards ceremony, Yahoo! was given the award for the best mobile infotainment. My friends at Fjord and bit-side were delighted as they have contributed to Yahoo! Go 3.0 service development. Judges' comments: “Easy to use, made-for-mobile video service that’s fun, free and fantastic. Sure fire winner amongst the mobile video fans.“

Christine Perey was there, introducing Informa’s report on the emergence of mobile social networks . The report estimates mobile social networking to exceed 50 million, 2.3% of mobile users. By 2012, there could be between 12.5% and 23% penetration. Mobile SNS revenues exceeded 3 B$ in 2007 and forecasted to grow to 30 B$ by 2012 (including all business models).
Jed Stremel, Director of mobile, Facebook announced the launch of their mobile service by Vodafone in 8 countries, using Intercasting client. They already have 6 million mobile users, generating 500, 000 PV/month (growing to 1 million). Facebook positions itself as social utility best for linguistic or geographic communities since it can be extended with open APIs . For example they have 3 million users in Turkey, a version in Spanish and French.

Bebo presented their mobile versions on Orange UK, O2 Ireland using client software from Newbay and Intercasting. Overall Bebo have 40 million on-line users averaging 40 minute usage / day. Users want mobile flat rate data plans and tariffs are still too expensive for mass usage, especially SMS-push at mobile SNS volumes. Jordy Mont-Renaud, mobile developer at Bebo , proposes different positioning for various services :

Facebook = be yourself , MySpace = be someone, Bebo = in-between

Yahoo! presented a way to aggregate multiple network from the client side, a solution our HP team considered enhancing with a network adress book.
Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 at the keynote session

Talk of mobile adverting was big. There are several forecasts of mobile advertising revenues by 2011 : 11 B$ (Informa), 14B$ (Strategy Analytics) and 19B$ (ABI Research). Pekka Ala-Pietila, CEO of Blyk was at the Sofinova party. He would not tell me subscribers numbers as they are not yet public. Rumors went from 250,000 to 1 million. I bloged on the launch last September. But there are over 100 advertisers and the CTR of 47% is a proof of the sound business model. Blyl confirmed expansion plans of the advertiser-sponsored model in EMEA during 2008. They have over 60 employees and some of the key staff was at the congress.

In his Telecom TV interview, Sebastiano Tevarotto of HP commented that there is an intuition that the Google model is going to impact the industry within 2 years or 5 years.
Mobile networks operators have to be selective about the value-add to convince customers to stay or come . Even the bit pipe business model is interesting as long as you have the right business model and not the aspiration to be a big brand.

In a keynote on ubiquitous networks John Chambers of Cisco also stressed that services move away from personalization to collaboration
"It’s not about You but about US. It’s about video not voice, and not just the services but the content. And it is not about devices but about the network architecture " (as you would expect from Cisco ! )

Cisco demos of video conference accross networks
For HP OpenCall, our team was presenting mobile group communications with video conferencing across networks. We used a client from Movial, who also introduced a social communicator and Jabber presence and IM servers. Our seamless transition from the handset video to the PC web-cam as you moved from one device to another was cool . We also had a nice demo of using SOA/SDP to interface your mobile services to Web 2.0 social networks like Facebook.

IMS was largely absent from the network services demos. But I noted Kris Patel, CTO of Kodiak Networks presenting their implementation of OMA converged messaging (CPM). It features an IMS SIP user agent in a web browser, SIP secure interfaces, CPM clients on handsets, inter-working with voice calls . With this implementation, Kodiak requires a carrier hosted infrastructure. Kris Patel argued that a convergent platform was beneficial because users are context aware and will change channels for different social communication needs.

From i- to G- phones replacing OS by browsers
If the mobile broadband is happening it is not so much because of the mobile 2.0 or video services but simply because of the gadgets ! In Hall 8, four out of the largest manufacturers released new handsets as they were trying to catch-up with iPhone the interface, the operating system and the functions. Motorola claimed they made all announcements at CES. MultiMedia Intelligence forecasted that multimedia phones will grow from 20 million units in 2007 to 250 million in 2011. Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin acknowledged that Apple had raised the bar for the industry with the launch of the iPhone last June. But he also stressed the need for a rationalization of operating systems : 30-40 OS are too many , we need not one but much less : Linux/Android or Symbian.


Arun Sarin, Chief Executive Officer, Vodafone

Goggle’s Android early movers NEC, TI, Qualcomm of were demonstrating different stacks to crowds of visitors. Texas Instruments has its development platform running OMAP 3430 CPU at 600 Mhz. NEC / Wind River were also showing a prototype running on a Medity2 at 500 MHz with a browser. Both were 2G radio. The Open Mobile Alliance talks no more about an operating system but a developer community democracy. Google does not want proprietary that would lock the application level. And multiple handsets were announced for 2008/2009.


HTC Android phone prototype, scheduled for H2/2008

Nokia launched four multimedia phones including the N78, N96, 6210 and 6220. all of which have HSDPA, GPS, Maps 2.0 and geotagging. But CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo had a trick in his pocket for his keynote. Called "remade," the new phone is actually made entirely of recyclable materials like cans and tires, it clearly targets planet-conscious customers.


"This is one cool phone"
Symbian S60 demos included : touch user interface, sensor technologies, Web runtime and Flash Lite runtime evolution with Service APIs, development platform (Open C evolution, C++, Python)

Nokia Symbian S60 touch screen demo

On the Windows Mobile front, Sony Ericsson's unveiled the SE XPERIA X1 smartphone running 6.1 and featuring a WVGA touchscreen display with 5 megapixel camera.

Mobile renews it’s love affair with movies.
Hollywood Robert Redford and producer Isabella Rosselini were presenting the awards at the National Palace. Is the mobile industry so attracted by entertainment that it will remain a content pipe ? Redford’s appearance as Sundance festival founder seemed a bit disconnected from the surrounding attendants.
Robert Redford : “What am I suppose to say here ?”

But the message was : forget cinema and HD, think mobile. Sundance commissioned independent filmmakers to come up with 3-5 minutes films of 3 to 5 minutes (3MB) and offered them 20,000$ for the production. And Isabella Rosselini announced 5 short movies : “Green Porn” illustrating sex life of insects shown in Mobile movies in Hall 7.
I attended the dinner with myvaves who won the best mobile video service award.
Rajeev Raman, CEO and Susan Cashen, VP Marketing of mywaves

Their free advertiser-sponsored mobile video service has 4.5 million visitors monthly with average viewing times of 25 minutes per session and 400,000 channels of premium, private and user-generated videos on WCDMA, and CDMA2000 phones running Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and RIM based phones. mywaves team comes from Yahoo!, Napster, Danger, Palm and TiVo.

Still, there were doubts in the congress whether Mobile TV is the killer app. Nielsen said that mobile operators are not able to keep subscriber after 2 ½ months while another study claimed that 25% of users watch it daily.

AMI workshop, February 6 2008, Martigny

The future of meetings is now
Christine Perey and Herve Boulard, Director of IDIAP .

AMI is a EU project focused on technologies for collaboration. Christine Perey, invited me to their workshop on the future of meetings in Martigny, Switzerland. AMI’s community of interest members include major players such as Adobe, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, IBM ,Intel, Nokia, Polycom ,Radvision, Tandberg and smaller innovative companies. I liked the following demos :

Summarizing videos
Andrei Popescu from IDIAP demonstrated a system that displays Google-like lists of documents with indication of relevance to the current meeting discussion. They deduct keywords using speech recognition. For example minutes.pdf will be highlighted when minutes of the previous meeting are being discussed. Even a tag and document cloud during a video / audio conference seems a nice to have add-on.

Publish your meeting comic strip
Tilman Becker from DFKI generates a comic book out of your video conference displaying images of participants and bubbles with key utterances extracted. The result is cool, it generates an additional motivation for e-meetings such as brainstorming or product design .

Summarize your conferences
A presenter from University of Edinburgh demonstrated automatic summarises produced using prosodic / linguistic / structural information. Great for annotation or indexing a conference archive. Another team at UoE is working on standardization of conferencing meta-data, working with W3C multimodal browser group.

AMI’s software is open
Jferret SDK is available from IDIAP. It’s a portable Windows /Linux and extensible. One of the programmers told me it requires 2 weeks of to integrate with other 3rd party developments. All AMI components have been integrated in this SDK so you can plug-play or extend as needed.