WirelessMoves

Things happen fast here in Barcelona. The Mobile Jam Session was just over and I was already on the bus to spend the evening with friends and fellow bloggers at the S60 reception in the evening. Thanks to Jan Bonnevier to talk with me about Ovi, I am going to check out the first fruits of your work at the Nokia booth today. It was also great to meet a couple of fellow bloggers from the U.S. who’ve made it to 3GSM for the first time this year, in particular Amir and Darla Mack. Lots of good discussions around mobiles, blogging and U.S. customs. Stefan, great to meet you there two, let’s increase the word count beyond 5 the next time 😉 A perfect event for relaxing after a busy day. A big thanks to the S60 team!

A bit of self advertising today as it`s always good to meet with Wiley, my publisher, at the congress to see how the book sales are doing and to take a look at the latest titles that have just been released. If you need to get an overview of different wireless technologies then I of course recommend you to pick up a copy of my book in the local book store, at Amazon or in any other online book store. To find out about the details of a specific system such as WiMAX or LTE there are a number of specialized books on these topics now. The book on LTE is written by Pierre Lescuyer whom I have known for a long time since we`ve been working in the same company for some time and it`s great to see Pierre has come up with another book.

I haven’t seen a lot of the 3GSM exhibition itself yet because there are a lot of things happening besides the congress and there are lots of interesting people to meet. Tuesday afternoon was the Mobile Jam Session and I am really glad I went to the event. Targeted at mobile developers the format was great to discuss the latest and greatest ideas and problems of mobile developers alike. I got many of my questions answered and got lots of good input.

One interesting thought I took away from the session which developed while we were discussing different User Interface approaches of Apple and the rest of the mobile industry is the relationship between operators and Apple vs. operators and Nokia: The Apple brand has a lot of marketing power and Appel had nothing to loose in the mobile space. This way they have managed nugging network operators into becoming a bit pipe for them and on top even share the revenue they make as a bit pipe with them. Nokia on the other hand is also a powerful brand but they make their money with selling handsets to operators and not so much by directly selling them to the customer. Consequently their handle on operators to do something new and bold was pretty much restricted. So it was good Apple came in and broke the ice.

But maybe mobile network operators felt that the iPhone was good for them because of it’s restrictions. Think what the data consumption with a Nokia Nseries phone would be if it were sold at the same conditions by mobile operators as the iPhone. Suddenly you have all those cool applications in addition to browsing and eMailing…

Anyway, just one of many interesting thoughts developing during the event. Thanks to Caroline and Rudy for organizing the event, I very much enjoyed it.

Also thanks to Peter for explaining soviet style tactics of mobile operators. Well, that’s for another post.

While at last years show HSPA functionality was not to be found on handsets except for the very high end mobile phones such as the N95, 3.5G connectivity has made it to mainstream handsets this year. A good example is the very small and light Sony-Ericssons K660 phone which is definitely targeted at the mass market.

Wifi still seems to be in the domain of high end handsets but it’s moving down the chain, too as it’s now being incuded in all Nokia Nseries handsets appearing on the market.

The 3GSM has it’s own television channel here at the fair. One of their programs, the CTO pannel caught my attention since it featured the CTOs of HP, Telefonica and Nortel and I find technical discussions a lot more interesting than CEOs talking about numbers. John Roese, CTO of Nortel said that CAPEX and OPEX are not half as important today than speed. If you are late with a product by 12 months, he said, it doesn’t matter how cheap it is, it’s already too late. Good point. The other CTO’s agreed and the HP CTO called this ‘moving at web speed’. Interesting picture he draws there, I like the comparison. From my point of view turning companies with tens of thousands of employees into a different direction at web speed requires a lot of power. Imagine how a turn of a supertanker looks like vs. the agility of a yacht.

I fell being set back in time at least 6 or 7 years these days as far as wireless data connectivity is concerned. Last year I picked up a Yoigo prepaid SIM in Madrid as they offer an affordable daily rate for data connectivity with their 3G network. Even back then I noticed that the network is quite slow and a high packet drop rate was greatly impacting web browsing experience. Now, half a year later and back in Barcelona things have even gotten worse. Since I arrived last Thursday the network keeps crashing and is unavailable for hours. How is this possible? What kind of gear are they using? What kind of service agreement do they have? Note that this is not a NETWORK TECHNOLOGY issue as other networks keep performing fine. This is purely a Yoigo thing. If coverage is not back within the hour I’ll put my Vodafone SIM card back in the mobile and life with the 15 euros a day rate for Internet access. Let’s hope that nobody with a Yoigo SIM card reports that the 3G networks in Barcelona are not capable of handling the load because one company can’t get it right.

It’s good to see Intel being so outspoken about WiMAX and the mobile Internet this year. Their booth in the main hall has a lot of WiMAX demos and they have a working multi base station network deploayed in Barcelona for demos. Looking forward to test the network with some real devices on Thursday. At the Intel party last night I had the opportunity to talk to Chris Beardsmore of Intel with whom I will hold the WiMAX course at Oxford university later this year. He says that in the last 18 months, he’s been super busy flying to all those future WiMAX operators in Europe to discuss Intel’s plans for WiMAX with them. He told me that he finds it very statisfactory to see WiMAX growing up from infancy to the launches that are happening now. During the event, an Intel VP also showed the combined Wifi / WiMAX chip for notebooks. Good stuff, hope they’ll put that into lots of notebooks soon to create a critical mass.

So here I am at the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards listening to 3 minute presentations of startups being selected in a lot of different Mobile Monday cities around the world to present their idea here in Barcelona.

To me, most concepts seem to be too complex to be understandably presented in 3 minutes as I have difficulties following some concepts let alone become excited about them. But there are some exceptions which I can connect with instantly. My favourite startup idea of the afternoon is from Sentry Wireless in Ireland. They have developed a SIM card application called KidSafe which screens incoming SMS and voice calls and only allows those to go through that have been preapproved before. This way parents can protect their kids from unsolicited SMS and phone calls from strangers who have picked up their kids phone number from who knows where. A great extension to products for kids to safely surf the web on PCs. Since the solution is SIM card based it will work with any phone. The approval process is done directly via the phone ‘s menu so no complex web setup or over the air provisioning is required. Good news for parents who at some point have to give that mobile phone to their youngsters.

For pictures of the event click on the Flickr bar on the right of the page.

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…