What we learned from Mobile World Congress

MWC 11 was a blast and threw up many interesting mobile developments. It was also timely, kicking of the day that the news broke that sales of smartphones have surpassed PCs in the developed world. We do now live in a mobile world. Capitalising on this, the halls of MWC were awash with the launch of new tablet – and to be fair many other novel form factors – all seeking to gain a slice of the emerging mobile computing world. In some of the more network tech based halls, there was much talk of 4G and LTE – both likely to make mobile networks truly broadband.

But with these network technologies not due on stream for at least another year in most parts of Europe (the US is storming ahead with mobile, 4G and smartphones as the ComScore survey in our story below reveals) much of the talk at MWC was just that: talk.

This is the perennial problem when the industry gathers en masse in Barcelona: 60,000 people become cossetted in a bubble of their own making and often loose site of what mobile is like in the real world. For instance, many of my colleagues (and myself) had to turn off the mobile data on our iPhones as it was just getting too expensive to run. I turned it on to look up the location of a venue and in doing so inadvertently downloaded a load of emails. I received a text from my operator telling me I had just spent £20. By the end of day one I was on £50 and I hadn’t done anything.

Similarly, all round the show the wifi was shonky – though free – and if you did want to make a call, the network was often jammed.

This is the real world of mobile – long on promise, not so hot on delivery, connectivity or indeed affordability.

With that in mind it is interesting to review what the key things that tickle the interest of the telemedia community actually were. While there was a lot of emphasis on new devices, the key themes for me were mobile advertising and marketing, mobile health, m-finance, banking and billing and machine-to-machine (M2M) services.

The fact that this year appears to be the ‘year of mobile advertising’ surprises no one, but is it really? There seems to be an ever growing roster of mobile ad networks cropping up, all claiming to be second in the market behind Google, yet still with much to prove in click throughs and returns. Of course, consumers are starting to click on adverts on mobile, but as with the online world (only much more rapidly) they are demanding much cleverer forms of mobile advertising: it really does have to be content that can be shared, rather than just a banner ad. And guess who does this best of all? Yep, Google.

Mobile health is another interesting one – very much a technology looking for a market. With falling revenues in voice, SMS and indeed apps and other mobile data, the industry is keen to find something indispensible that it can make money from: and healthcare seems and obvious and lucrative choice. There has been much written about how the medical profession can use mobile, but now there are a raft of products being aimed at consumers. A lot of them target those with elderly parents who, rather than paying to put them in a home, can have them wired up to a mobile that sends regular updates of blood pressure and other vital signs, whether they have taken their meds and whether they are upright, breathing and so on. Its guilt based product marketing, but probably has, in the new austerity, a role to play. What the old people who are being wired up with all this feel about it is not recorded.

The other key trend at the show was much closer to home for most telemedia execs – billing, payments and mobile money. There are a wealth (geddit?) of mobile wallet schemes poised to enter the market and still much talk around NFC as a payment tool, but when you talk to anyone who actually routinely collects money through mobile for stuff, PSMS is still carrying the bulk of their billing.

Take someone like Flirtomatic: it is looking at how to integrate all manner of new payment tools into its revamped service and it knows that card and wallet payments will become commonplace eventually, but for now it still uses PSMS and operator billing for the bulk of what it does. No, most companies like this aren’t happy with the outpayments, but it is getting better slowly. So good news, PSMS is here to stay. For now anyway.