I have been meaning to write this entry for a few weeks, but it seems to have been a busier year than I anticipated. So here goes.
I have attended The Mobile World Congress (MWC) in its various guises and locations for most of the past 15 years. It was the GSM Congress in Cannes back in 1996 when I first attended, it later became 3GSM and has moved from Cannes to Barcelona. I have always felt that this show, more than any other was the bellwether for the mobile industry. The biggest names always roll out their glitziest offerings at this show. The keynote speeches always try to capture the industry zeitgeist. The attendance is genuinely multi-national and multi-cultural. You can't help but feel that you are at the centre of the mobile universe for those few short days in February, and for that reason you feel that you are getting a glimpse of what the future will hold.
You also feel, almost absurdly, that for once Europe is the centre of the world. This is partly because GSM was a European standard firstly and the specifications are still maintained by ETSI in France. But it was also because people in Europe didn't quite get what was happening in Japan and Korea and we also thought that the people in the US didn't quite get what mobile was all about. We knew that everyone in the US carried pagers and we saw that the 'cellphones' used on the TV shows were outdated Motorola flip phones with telescopic aerials. So whatever was going on over the 'pond' it certainly wasn't leading edge.
This year was the third year I had attended the Mobile World Congress since the release of the iPhone, it was therefore the third year that the biggest current influence on mobile wasn't present at the biggest show. So something was starting to feel a little 'out-of-touch' about the Mobile World Congress!
There was also something a little bit uneasy about many of the people I spoke to at the show. It seemed that gradually the optimism and shine of the show was wearing thin. People seemed ever so slightly desperate. From handset manufacturers still trying to get their touchscreen phones and app stores launched, to infrastructure providers wondering where the next deal was going to come from, to the content providers, in the App Planet, praying they were onto the next big thing. Everyone seemed a bit more anxious that ever before.
I came away with the feeling that the Mobile World Congress had slipped a little in relevance. It didn't seem to be defining the direction that mobile was taking or should take. More than that it has always been a beauty pageant for the Mobile Operators. A place where the undisputed kings of the mobile jungle would make their choices about what would happen next in our mobile lives. This seems to have changed and been changed by companies from the US who have redefined the mobile eco-system. Apple and Google have between them moved the mobile battleground away from Carrier Services and towards handset applications. People are still interested in the tariff of their mobile phone, but they are more interested in getting the applications they love. Software seems to be cool again and network services seem to be like drainage. You are glad its there but you don't want to spend much time discussing it.
So it was with some disappointment that I left the show and Barcelona.
Just over a month later I found myself in Las Vegas for CTIA Wireless and inevitably I found myself comparing the two shows.
It had been twenty years since my previous visit to Las Vegas. That time I had been in a VW Combi van with my girlfriend, travelling around the US over the course of a year. This time I was working and on a bigger budget and didn't expect to enjoy the trip as much. How wrong I was.
I had travelled to the US from Sydney, Australia. Flying into L.A. and then driving with a friend from L.A to Las Vegas was great fun. Las Vegas was in a way the opposite of Barcelona. Barcelona is all narrow streets, steeped in history and dripping with culture. Las Vegas was the contrary. That said, the people were so friendly and courteous that you just got swept along in the myths of ancient Egypt and Rome.
The show itself, CTIA Wireless, was actually pretty small. Probably about a quarter of the size of MWC. But it more than made up for it in two ways:
Firstly and most importantly there was huge optimism. You would think that the economy was flying along everyone was making money and was happy to share out their success. Whereas in Barcelona I had had conversations with anxious looking sales staff from large companies, who clearly were wondering where their end of quarter bonus would come from; here in Las Vegas everyone appeared to be safe, almost smug, with the reassurance that the venture backers did not expect a return for at least two more years. I quickly realised that whereas in Europe the mobile industry is a bit stagnant with carriers trying to shore up their revenues and handset manufacturers, especially Nokia looking like they would never again dominate an industry that they once rightfully claimed as their own. In the US on the other hand, mobile is one of the hot topics. And many of the companies exhibiting at CTIA were very ebullient about services they were running which were indicators of almost certain future success.
Secondly, there was good reason for the optimism. The US people always seems to me to be naturally optimistic, and it is infectious. But to have good reason for the optimism is something which made a big difference. From my perspective the good reason for optimism is that the US finally 'gets mobile' in its broadest sense. I used to talk to visitors to Europe from the US about running mobile marketing campaigns or connecting up corporate applications to SMS and I would get almost blank looks. Those were the days when the US view of using mobile was using a Compaq iPaq for stock-taking in the warehouse. What was and is happening now is that you see advertising for SMS information services everywhere, you see SMS marketing keywords and shortcodes on billboards, on the seats of taxis and on TV. SMS is everywhere. And because the market is so big, there is room for just about everyone. You just have to pick you market and get on with it. So the reason for the optimism is because people are successful with their mobile strategies.
I think the breakthrough technology to change all of this must be the iPhone. It helps that Apple is a US company, but it also helps that Google, Microsoft and RIM are also US companies. And what helps more and more is that the US is the home of SaaS or Software as a Service style businesses. Put all of this together and you see that if you are in the business of hooking up businesses to cool apps on even cooler handsets (Mobility as a Service or MaaS), then the US seems to hold all the aces.
I would recommend anyone to go to CTIA Wireless and challenge you to come away without forming the strong opinion that mobile value added services are in their infancy, they have fantastic potential and for sure the place to exploit that potential is going to be the US for some time to come.