3GSM / WMC 08: First day summary

After 8 days on snow skiing in both Mont Sainte Anne in Quebec and then coaching at Alpine in Ontario, I drove 2 hours through a blizzard to the airport where I boarded my flight to Barcelona through Zurich.

Last year I made the mistake of booking through Alitalia – which is like flying on a very old bus with wings. On the advice of others, this year I booked Air Swiss.

From Toronto the Air Swiss flight was actually operated by Air Canada but I was lucky to have three seats to myself which included two power outlets! Shortly after take-off I had my command centre setup with my laptop, video camera and iphone all powered up.

We nearly missed our connecting flight in Zurich. Funny enough, our Air Swiss flight was operated by Spanish Air. Each seat came with access to a giant shoe-horn. I managed to squeeze into my seat without the shoe-horn, but i had no space to move.

It was like flying in a straight jacket.

We arrived in Barecelona late Monday morning with a few hours of sleep under our belts. Unfortunately by the time we checked into our hotel, showered and unpacked it was already 2pm local time – which meant I was going to miss the Mobile Monday peer awards. Too bad!

Instead we headed to the mobile congress, grabbed our badges and spent 3 hours exploring Hall 1 and 2. With over 1600 vendors on site, it’s going to take us all week to make it through all 8 halls.

I put on my marketer’s hat and went looking for content, applications, devices, and ideas on how we can use mobile to engage and interact with current and potential customers for our clients.

I saw some pretty interesting devices and was especially impressed with the lineup of devices from Japan’s NTT DoCoMo. The rollable screen from Polymer Vision was also impressive and will warrant it’s own blog posting.

There were also many companies promoting QR code (or similar) applications. I’ve gathered some good material around this and will share how other markets such as the UK and Japan have or are adopting and integrating QR codes with other traditional media in a later post.

Time to get ready for the opening night party!