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Last night was Mobile Sunday, organized by Rudy de Waele of m-trends.org in the LaChica bar in Barcelona. Incredible event, the bar was packed and I would say it easily had the highest concentration of mobile startup representatives per square meter in the world. Lot’s of serious business card exchanges went on. Mentioning all the interesting people I have met would easily overflow the blog so I’ll just focus on some examples.

As the Mobile Sunday was sponsored by MyStrands, their team was there in force again to show their recommendation solutions. Thanks Jane for showing me the stuff you have added since last year!

Location and what you can do with it is a hot topic for me this year. So I was glad to meet Andrew Grill from Seeker Wireless, a company specializing in location solutions. Their products range from home zone solutions on SIM cards to Java Libraries for enhancing cell based location methods to improve accuracies of programs making use of this type of positioning. We also discussed location and mobile advertising and how targeted advertising based on current location of the user could enhance the experience. That brings mobile operator Blyk to my mind who could definitely use such a solution. So in short, concerning non-GPS location, there’s no way around Seeker.

I have to say that I was quite impressed with the many French companies being present yesterday who are active in mobile despite the difficult conditions in France concerning affordable pricing for mobile data. I talked with Cederic Giorgi for example about Goojet a new portal idea that is a mixture of Facebook and Netvibes. And finally for today, if you are a startup in Europe or France and need some help with your PR to find venture capital funding etc. talk to Lucie-Anne Radimsky of ballou>>pr in Paris.

Intensive mobile online activities take a heavy tool on the battery of my N93. Blogging, checking things on the web, reading eMail, Jaikuing, taking pictures + uploading them to Flickr, navigating with Nokia Maps, using the mobile as a modem for my Nokia N800 Internet tablet and that battery is empty within half a day. Of course I have a spare battery to keep me going. However, I can only recharge one battery overnight… Well I guess for the second one the time between getting up and leaving the hotel must be enough. Let’s see maybe the S60 guys have a solution for me at the booth…

So what do you do on a Sunday morning in Bercelona when you need to buy a couple of things you can’t buy on a Sunday around the next corner? Of course you could go out and look for a supermarket that is open on Sundays. That probbably won’t work because according to Murphy’s law, they will hide from you until you have at least found one. You could ask a local but that usually also doesn’t work as he or she is likely not to speak English… Typical search issues in a foreign town. So I tried a local search on my N93. With Opera mini, I querried the Yahoo search engine for ‘Barcelona Supermarket Sunday’. Instantly, I get search results that point me to supermarkets open on Sundays. The winner was a report from a tourist who’s had the same problem and was nice enough to link to the web page of a supermarket chain including location, phone number and everything. Excellent. A quick look on Nokia maps on the mobile reveals the exact location and metro station and I am on the way. Great, that’s how it should be.

It`s Sunday and I am in Barcelona for some sightseeing before the Mobile World Congress starts tomorrow. I`ve already collected my badge yesterday to avoid queueing up tomorrow morning. Lines are going to be long. Afterwards I took a quick look at the exhibition ground. As you can see on the picture on the left, everything is pretty much still in flux. By Monday morning it will look a lot different.

It`s amazing how many people are working at the exibition to get everything set up and ready for tomorrow. From technicians, to plumbers to telecoms people who set up demo networks, the Fira hosts a crowd speaking in at least 5 languages simultaneously if you stop for a moment and focus some of the conversations around. Add to that some beautiful weather, 18 degrees celcius air temperature and a light wind and there is not much more to be desired, except perhaps if you are one of those who have to prepare the Fira.

You can find more pictures on my Flickr account, the link is on the right of the page. Starting tomorrow stay tuned for daily updates from the event. For quick thoughts I`ll use Jaiku. You can find my stream on the right of this page. Since the event is huge I expect that everyone has something different to say. The 3GSM side events wiki I have  also linked to at the right of the page contains a list of others who have said they would also report live from the event.

A couple of days ago, Dean Bubbley over at Disruptive Wireless ran an interesting article on an effort by some 3GPP members to specify a way to use the current wireless circuit switched voice telephony infrastructure and telephony protocol stack on handset over wireless packet switched networks. In essence their approach replaces the circuit switched bearer with a packet switched connection on lower layers while leaving the protocol stack for call establishment in place. A gateway in the network and some modifications in the lower protocol layers on the mobile phone and ready is a potential competitor for voice over IMS. 

I’ve had this work item under my nose for some time but was not sure if 3GPP members were really serious about it. It seems they are and it looks like the Technical Recommendation (TR 23.8799) seems to be pretty much complete although the conclusion is still missing. Also interesting to see that in the Work Item description (SP-070401) Ericsson is listed as a supporting company and that handset vendors are not part of the initiators.

When I look at the timelines for this work item I would say that a practical implementation in the field is at least 3 years away at best. Adoption and ratification of the Technical Report (note, it is NOT a technical standard document yet) is due in June 08. Afterwards they would have to crank out the details. If they are quick then that takes 12 to 15 months in 3PP Release 9 and at least the same amount of time for standards conform ant implementation and the testing afterwards. That would make it 2010 – 2011 for deployment.

To me this whole thing looks a little bit like an IMS exit strategy. If after 10 years of standardization, IMS hasn’t made it out of the lab and into the pockets of people and the CS over PS solution makes it into the field before then it could very well spell the death for IMS. Once this is in the field why would an operator seriously consider IMS afterwards? By 2012 even the most backwards oriented mobile operator will have understood that except for voice telephony they have no chance on the application layer against the global Internet competition in a converging beyond 3G and Wifi network environment.

It’s like opening an additional front on the IMS battleground and would remove it’s ultimate insurance policy, i.e. being the only technology for operators for voice technology in their B3G networks.

But competition is a good thing and it might speed things up one way or the other.

I am looking forward to meet with Polymer Vision Ltd. at 3GSM / Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The company is a Philips spin-off working on foldable or rather rollable displays. Their approach is to apply organic particles on a thin plastic plastic foil which is then used as a display. A report (in German) on "Der Spiegel" says they will show first production models of a mobile phone and ebook reader hybrid during 3GSM. Here’s a video that shows their technology:

Wired magazine published an interesting article with background information about how the iPhone was developed at Apple and how Steve Jobs managed convince carriers to give him all the freedom to do what he wanted and how he talked them into giving him a share of the bit-pipe revenue. While carriers in the past had nightmares about only becoming a bit-pipe they are now even sharing the revenue with a handset manufacturer. Flexibility or desperation? But maybe they have seen that being a bit-pipe is actually being a long tail enabler?

After having spent the better part of an evening touring friends and family to get their DSL and cable lines back up running I once more noticed two striking advantages of wireless broadband versus the fixed line competition:

• Installation cost: For wireless broadband you go to the next supermarket (in some countries) and buy a bundled SIM card and USB/PCMCIA HSDPA modem. The software is pretty much self installing and you are up and running in 10 minutes. Compare that to the 10 months waiting time of a friend of mine for a cable connection and the 3 hour installation time with 4 technicians retrofitting the cable infrastructure in the apartment building. Also, compare that to the DSL nightmare in many countries when you want to switch from one DSL provider to another. I know few people who managed to get that done seamlessly and far to many who sat on the dry for weeks and weeks before their DSL link started working again.

• Troubleshooting: If there is a problem on the last mile on your DSL and cable link it’s likely that you are the only one that is impacted. Have fun convincing the customer hotline that it’s not your PC or modem that is acting up. If there is a problem with the base station in a wireless network, however, 1000 people will be impacted, red lights will start flashing in the network operation center and emergency repair operations will kick in within a couple of minutes.

I leave it to you to draw the conclusions.

I came across this YouTube video today where Vivian Reding, EU commissioner for information society and media, speaks about the Internet, broadband penetration, competition and freedom of information. In the video she says that broadband Internet access works best in countries that have lot of competition in the market and that she works hard to open up markets and foster competition. Hear hear! I wished the EU would push equally hard for competition in wireless broadband Internet access and mention some of the black sheep 🙂

Lots of problems these days in Kenya, but here’s a bit of a hopeful story: A friend made me aware of M-Pesa a couple of days ago, a new mobile payment system in Kenya. It seems that a a lot of people in this country do not have a banking account due to the high costs. M-Pesa fills the gap with a mobile bank account which is free of charge. Transactions, for which a service fee is charged, are performed via SMS which are sent by a little application which sits on the SIM card. The technology behind it is called SIM Application Toolkit (SAT). As SAT is a 3GPP standard the application can be used with any mobile phone. Money can be sent to M-Pesa  customers and also to non members. Additionally, the application can also be used to top-up somebody else’s prepaid account. According to the M-Pesa entry in the German Wikipedia, the service launched by Safaricom and Vodafone at the beginning of 2007 is already used by 20% of their subscribers.