One more time I attended the mobile industry annual party. It's been over a decade by now, good time to measure the change since 2000 - most of the promises have been held : subscribers grew 10X, smart phones exceed 50% of shipments, bandwidth is finally there with 3G bundles and first LTE deployments live, mobile web nearly ubiquitous (Ovum estimates : 95% of traffic is data, 60% of which HSPA). Not everybody in the industry was partying tough : Google has entered the game, opening the show while Nokia and HP were quietly exited the main exhibition to organize side parties. Overall, business and climate was cold and rainy in Barcelona this year. In summary :
Money and innovation is moving to applications.
Cloud and web players dominate the battlefield.
Money and innovation is moving to applications.
Innovation could be seen mostly at the edge. I attended the Mobile premier awards (MPA) masterminded by Rudy de Waele where 11 out of 49 start-up nominees were awarded prizes by the 500-audience and official judges. Layar won two awards for their augmented reality platform, Taxipal and PercentMobile won awards from the MoMo community and audience respectively. At the Fira, I spent some time in Hall 7 was re-named App Planet, featuring a start-up App Garage and developer workshops. I supported there a HP Labs project Friendlee nominated for an RCS innovation award. The start-up meeting from Finland and Israel organized by FinnMob and IMA was great. At the forefront of user experiences, augmented reality was demonstrated by 20 start-ups at a showcase organized by Vodafone, and PEREY Research & Consulting. VCs were attending these applications events including Accel Partners (check Rich Wong's pres at MPA) , Endeavour vision, Bluenove, Blumberg Capital, Sofinova Ventures . One VC advised on applications in adjacent industries : "these opportunities will exceed those of LTE infrastructure; find them by following your passion". This view is reflected in the drop of VC investment in traditional telecoms in 2009 : $1.6 billion, down 33% from 2008 and only peanuts were served at start-up parties ;-)
On the operator side, 24 of GSMA members anounced the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), an open industry platform for mobile app developers to reach a market of 3 billion subscribers. They endorsed standards from the The Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) group created by Asian operators in 2008 including SDK, widgets and BONDI . On the vendor side, Sony Ericsson announced their creation platform for facilitating user generated content.Cloud and web players dominate the battlefield.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote, - timidly read from a script as is if uncertain how to address legacy telco audiences- emphasized “Mobile First” strategy, featuring Flash and speech recognition : "the job here is to create magic" . 60,000 handsets running Android system are shipping/day (20 million this year). One Android device I previewed with Allen Prohitis is HP's Airlife 100 smartbook anouncing a 10" touch screen, Qualcomm's Snapdragon-3G chipset and 12 hours battery - interesting departure from Win7 within the HP Mini family. HTC announced 2 Android handsets : the HTC Legend and HTC Desire.
What was the industry reaction ? Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo responded with a partnership with Intel to release Meego, the union of 2 Linux platforms – Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo . OPK modestly stating "the MeeGo platform is set to revolutionize computing" but you will have to wait : a baseline in March for Intel Atom and N900 but other devices later in the year.
Which wave should a developer surf on, in the Android, Chrome, Maemo, Windows ocean ? Symbian Foundation just launched Symbian^3 an open source platform and a developer forum. And Microsoft announced its Windows Phone 7, a complete new release. Chip vendors such as ARM, Qualcomm, TI will also edge their alliance bets. I am a fan of BONDI, a smaller initiative for the mobile web which aims at reducing mobile browser fragmentation by releasing W3C-compliant widget APIs as the application run-time for mobile devices. They released version 1.1 at MWC on a number of different O/S including Android. And Opera announced Mini 5 beta is support to Android, complete with newest features that had been late to arrive.
