Last week I went to Europe attending the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. This is generally seen as the global premier event for anything mobile, almost everyone is here including device manufacturers, operators, software providers and range of other businesses. The event is held in the middle of Barcelona in a beautiful setting in the early spring time with some sunshine and plenty of tapas.
Soonr was chosen for a Mobile Monday Peer award, representing Silicon Valley. What a great honor! Attended by over 700 people, we were about 20 chosen emerging mobile companies from all over the worlds talking about our visions and offerings. I have to give credit to the folks from the Mobile Monday organization for organizing a great event that included many of the movers and shakers in this industry.
At the event itself, it was very interesting that the company that probably had the most influence didn’t even attend the event, namely Apple. Apple with its iPhone has created a lot of new trends in the industry that were quite apparent in Barcelona. Let me cover a few of those.
First, I met a number of companies creating appstore offerings. Clearly you will see an appstore of any mobile phone. Mobile applications are becoming mainstream. The iPhone has finally shown the world that its possible to create a compelling platform for mobile applications. Personally I probably have about 20 apps on my iPhone, in all my years (10 years+) as a loyal Nokia user, I probably downloaded less than 5 apps, and that’s not because the apps didn’t exist but because I either didn’t know about them or I somehow perceived it as a hassle to get installed on my phone. One company I spoke to was GetJar who is an appstore for everything but the iPhone, so far they have had 175 million downloads! In addition, many of the mobile operators are planning their own appstore offerings, like O2’s Litmus program,
Secondly, the iPhone itself has caused everyone to realize that they need to develop touch-screen phones with a compelling user experience. So far, that means everyone is coming out with touch screen phones, you even see like on the picture below some Chinese manufacturers create exact replicas of the iPhone ( the phone to the left is not an iPhone) .
They are practically the same!
But at this point, in reality all these other phones are way behind the iPhone when it comes to the user experience. For instance while many of them have touch screens, its more like a stylus-based approach where the user can point to a specific point on the screen, no zoom gestures or cool scrolling; oftentimes I find myself having a hard time hitting what I aim for on these small screens. The Palm Pre is a candidate for creating an experience close to the iPhone, however the Pre was not shown publicly at the show, so who knows when it will be available and how quickly it can create traction in the market. In the end, the market for application-oriented devices is clearly in focus and everyone is working on hardware that is integrated with a great user experience and application platform.
Thirdly, the other aspect of the iPhone is that the Operators are having mixed feelings about the success of the iPhone. Yes, it’s a great phone with great uptake and real use, but at the same time it also appears that Apple is not generating a lot of profit for the operators. So the operators are clearly looking around for alternatives, an example here is Vodafone who announced a Google Android-powered HTC phone, named the Magic . I guess working with Google is now also becoming reality for the operators who will have deal with another partner who isn’t exactly into sharing their (ad-based) revenues with partners. Its also very interesting that HTC, who otherwise was a very early adopter of Windows Mobile is now moving towards Android.
All this is very good news for us here at Soonr, as we offer a service that provides more value-add to any internet connected device: 1) We will benefit from more app-stores so people can easier learn about us , 2) devices will continue to improve so we can deliver a better application experience along the lines of our much praised iPhone app and 3) being a company that also works with Operators we can help them leverage the momentum they are seeing with smartphones, mobile broadband and mobile applications as we for instance have done with Teliasonnera.
Besides this, there was a lot of focus on mobile broadband at the event. This has become the real killer application for the 3G network, especially here in Europe. At the event you saw mobile broadband dongles everywhere. This is also very much in line with what we are seeing here at Soonr, many of our users tells us how Soonr + mobile broadband helps them make sure that their laptops are always backed up, they have access to all their files on other (and others) computers, they can easily share documents on the spot and when the laptop is the turned off they can do the same things on their smartphones.
After the show I left Barcelona, to go up to our office in Denmark, it was a bit of a change leaving the nice spring-like Barcelona in return for below freezing temperatures and snow in Denmark.
