For many of the salespeople, technologists and marketing gurus who converge on Barcelona each February, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) represents the year's biggest opportunity to showcase the latest devices, ideas and services to an audience that numbers well over 50,000.
At this "must-attend annual gathering of the mobile industry" you'll find senior mobile leaders representing thousands of companies from more than 200 countries. As you can imagine, the event is a pretty intense experience, and I'm not even trying to sell anything.
This year was my second congress. My first was in 2008, when I sat on a panel – Society on the Move – which aimed to showcase some of the non-profit use of mobile technology, giving it a degree of visibility to delegates. Sadly, this hasn't been repeated. So, for anyone like me who's interested in "mobiles for development", finding interesting and relevant innovation can be a little hit and miss.
On top of that, mention the words "non-profit" to a salesperson trying to seal that one big deal and they'll usually run a mile.
But all that aside, I did manage to track down a few interesting mobile for development-related stories during my two days there.
One of the first things that struck me was how far the Android platform had come. During my first Congress in 2008, Android was the new kid on the block, having just been announced a few months earlier. This year, Android seemed to be everywhere.
What makes this particularly relevant is that it's most likely to be an Android-powered device that breaks the sub-$50 price tag for a genuine smart phone in the developing world. My belief, though, is that $40 will represent a real game changer. In the meantime, entry-level "dumb" phones – predominantly voice and SMS-based – will continue to dominate, and debate will continue in the ICT4D field as to the advantages and disadvantages of each.
On the first day, the "Congress Daily" ran an interesting article on the growth of mobile subscribers. With the developing world now accounting for four in every five mobile connections, this kind of news is guaranteed to turn many heads. While we see this growth as an opportunity to develop useful, relevant, socially based services, the commercial world sees a market waiting to be tapped.
And you can see why. According to the World Bank's "Wireless intelligence"(.pdf), while new connections grew last year at a rate of around 4% in mature, developed markets, across the developing world they grew at a staggering 19%. The race to get handsets into the remaining 1.5 billion hands yet to hold one is going to be interesting viewing, not least because many of the companies trying to sell to these markets are yet to fully understand the specific cultural and geographic needs of the people living there.
If one word were to sum up my findings at MWC, it would be "embed". The Embedded Sim project, for example, proposes a "worldwide standard that will allow the remote management of sims, effectively removing the need for a physical sim card and allowing them to be embedded in many different types of device". Embedded sims open up all sorts of opportunities, although I'm not sure how this will impact on the increasing numbers of multi-sim devices popping up in the developing world.
Gemalto also showed off its "Facebook sim card", which will allow even the most basic, entry-level phones to access a limited range of Facebook functionality, and Twitter spoke of its desire to further embed the micro-blogging service in new devices. Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg took the opportunity in his keynote speech to once again deny plans for a Facebook phone, preferring to emphasise plans to embed and integrate the service more smoothly and fully into existing pieces of kit.
A number of innovative development-focused projects were showcased at the Global Mobile Awards, a prestigious event traditionally held on the second evening of MWC. Winners this year included Ericsson Community Power for the best use of mobile for social and economic development. Its initiative allows "subscribers to recharge their mobile phones with excess power generated from the [base] station, which in turn drives network usage and revenue". Thankfully, green energy is getting increasing traction among operators, particularly those operating in the developing world (sadly not so much where I live in the UK).
The BBC World Service Trust won best product, initiative or service for underserved segment for BBC Janala, which provides short audio lessons via mobile phones to millions of people in Bangladesh wanting to learn English. And Vodafone Group, Safaricom, Vodacom, Vodafone Essar Limited and Roshan Ltd all romped home in the best mobile money for the unbanked service for their ongoing work deploying M-Pesa around the world.
The GSMA Development Fund also ran a number of side events at MWC, profiling their own work on mHealth and mWomen. The two winners of their mwomen base of the pyramid app challenge were announced at a special event, with the prizes going to NextDrop in the feature-phone category, and Tiendatek for smart phones.
All-in-all it was a fascinating event. My one hope would be that, in future, a little more of the work going on in "mobile for development" could be mainstreamed into the main conference, perhaps with a return to a session similar to that run in 2008. As more and more mobile innovation makes its way back from the developing world to the developed, it's the least many of these innovations deserve.
