3GSM / WMC 08: Day 3 and 4 Summary

The last two days have gone by like a blur.

I managed to explore all the halls - although I spent most of my time in Hall 7 where I spent a lot of time talking to content providers and managers and those who propagate or aggregate mobile data through tools, widgets, applications, SMS, IM, and the mobile web.

I’ve got about 12 more video clips from the conference that i’m in the process of optimizing & uploading to YouTube. Look for at least one a day until I get them all out.  

Things that stuck out include:

1. No real hype around Android…including from Google. I guess it’s still too early?
2. No iphone “killers” from any of the manufactures - although plenty of talk on the street about those devices hitting the market in the next few months
3. No notable examples of how we can leverage MMS or Bluetooth for marketing messaging
4. Japan has the coolest phones. The most impressive phones we saw were from Panasonic that featured a beautiful screen that was playing HD TV. Other cool flip phones that can be opened different ways for different applications.
5. Hardly anything interesting on location based services (LBS).  There were a few social networking sites that had elements of it - but nothing that blew us away.
6. The big content players are moving away from the mobile web and embracing mobile widgets - especially Yahoo.
7. Mobile Social Networking and utilities that support and integrate with web social media sites are evolving. I’ve been invited to participate in some alpha versions and I’ll blog about my experience on them later

I was too busy with meetings to catch the live speakers & news conferences, but I managed to pick up the daily mobile newspaper which had complete coverage of everything newsworthy from the week. I’ll go through these over the next few weeks and will blog about anything of significance.  

The night life has been fun. Last night we went to the Mobile Entertainment Forum party that was sponsored by Nokia.  There were about a dozen women walking around with the N95 phone taking pictures which were then uploaded to their Nokia mobile social networking site called Mosh.

Go their desktop or mobile site and type in the keyword “barcelona.rocks“ to see all the fun pictures.  They didn’t really appreciate the fact that I kept pulling out my iphone… although the picture above somehow made it to their site.

I love the irony.

Overall it was a great week of education, enlightenment, and validation that we are on the right path with our own mobile marketing initiatives.