Elements at the Mobile World Congress 2016
Lennart Lachmeijer and I went to the GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) this February 22nd through 25th. I believe its my eighth or ninth MWC visit (first one was in 2006 when it was still called 3GSM World Congress back then). I have seen the congress grow significantly over the years: not only the number of attendees but also exhibitors, (keynote) speakers and ways to network. The words massive and amazing come to mind when I think of what the MWC has become.
What is MWC
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain is an annual event for the industries related to mobile, organised by the GSMA. It’s the world’s biggest mobile industry event with over 100,000 attendees and 2,200 exhibitors. The congress spans nine massive halls and one dozen outdoor spaces at Fira Gran Via and Fira Montjuïc.
MWC describes itself as “a great place for learning about new technology: the remarkable substance called graphene joined the lineup of specialty exhibition pavilions in 2016, alongside Mobile Health, NFC, Apps, Green Technology, IoT, and Wearables.”
Lennart and I visited many of the exhibitor booths (as always, some are more interesting than the other) and tried to find out what “problem” they try to solve with their solutions.
Networking @ Dutch Mobile Community 2016
In the evening of the first day, Monday February 22th, the Dutch Mobile Community organised the Holland House event in Club Shôko, one of the best restaurant and nightlife spots located at the Barcelona beach. The idea of the event is that Dutch attendees of the MWC can network.
It is always interesting and fun to talk to other Dutch entrepreneurs in the mobile business and some of our clients that traveled to Barcelona.
App Planet
The App Planet section “incorporates Exhibition, Networking, and Developer Conference Sessions, which provide opportunities for developers and mobile professionals to learn and network with industry leaders of app development.”
App Planet is all about app development, app tools, app libraries, app platforms etc. We have seen many solutions regarding automated and crowd sourced testing solutions, push, video encoding, analytics and crash reporting platforms. Too many mobile ad solutions for my taste though.
Virtual Reality & 360º video
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped by on the first day of the MWC to tell the world how important Virtual Reality will become. Facebook, of course, acquired Oculus back in 2014. He announced that in his believe “VR is the next platform where anyone can experience anything they want. It’s going to change the way we live and work and communicate”.
There is this hilarious picture circulating on the internet about Zuckerberg walking through the conference hall while everybody in the audience is wearing a VR headset, unaware of Zuckerberg.
Quite some other companies showed their VR products, including HTC that demoed their new Vive VR device with an improved VR experience. Also, Michiel Frackers had a talk about Jaunt, which provides a 360º camera with a “badass design” to create cinematic VR experiences on smartphones. Also Samsung and LG demoed there consumer cameras which can create 360 degrees experiences.
Internet of Things
Last year, in September, Erwin and I went to the IoT Solutions World Congress, also in Barcelona. This was a very small but interesting congress with only a few exhibitors, so I was a bit surprised to see so many IoT-related exhibitors at the MWC.
We learned about Sigfox, the advantages over LoRaWAN and we got a more in-depth explanation about LoRa and the advantages over Sigfox. We got our hands on LoRaWAN node devkits from the friendly folks at Microchip, so we will start experimenting with this and share our experiences in another blog item in the not so far future.
We also spoke with the people from Libelium, a Spanish company that offers a wide range of of IoT hardware such as gateways and sensors. Libelium also launched an The IoT Marketplace during the MWC. This marketplace website offers vertical starter kits like the Smart City IoT kit or Smart Agri IoT kit to kickstart any proof of concept IoT project.
For sure IoT is not going away any time soon.
4YFN
The 4YFN (“Four years from now”) event, located at Fira Montjuïc at Plaça España, brought together “the best mobile start-ups and entrepreneurs with investors, accelerators, incubators and big corporations from the digital and non-digital world”.
We have seen many interesting startups here, such as 3.14 (combining paper crafts and electronics into toys), Xetal (indoor people localization technology), YoDiWo (IoT cloud platform), Um.ai (smart food advisor), Nextome (indoor positioning and navigation) and Extreme Reality (analyzing persons in 3D using webcams).
All in all
This was another great installment of the MWC and I am looking forward attending next year to see what technology unfolds then.
Originally published at www.elements.nl on February 29, 2016.
