The annual world mobile congress (wmc) starts today in Barcelona, Spain.  

The WMC will bring a lot of news and announcements. As the largest mobile phone show in the world, GSMA not only attracts people from around the world, but also sets the stage for what will happen in wireless for the next 12 months.

Although this will be the first year in a few that I haven’t had the opportunity to participate directly, I’m looking forward to following some of my favorite mobile blogs and news sites this week to stay at least partially connected to what is happening.  Look for mini-updates in my twitter feed and some summary stories on this blog. 

Look for some big announcements this week including a new smartphone from Toshiba and Acer, an upgraded mobile platform / os from Microsoft, hopefully news of a 3G GSM version of the Palm Pre, more Google Android devices, news on rival app stores to compete with Apple, details into how Nokia is going to focus more on services than hardware and probably nothing from Apple who were noticeably absent last year as well.  

What are you hoping will be announced this week?

Today while reviewing the weekly carnival of the mobilists, I came across a review of Palm’s new Synergy over at atmaspheric.

What’s most interesting about Synergy is that it accesses the “cloud” in order to sync all your calendar, email, and contact accounts.

Unlike Microsoft and Apple’s iphone, you don’t need a central computer to sync or save data. There isn’t even a button to sync.. all you do is use the device and when changes, additions, or deletions are made, the Pre will automatically make the updates through the cloud to the original sources.

For example, if you are accessing your facebook contact list and you update a phone number on your Pre, it will auto-sync your facebook account.

As I commented on the original post, wouldn’t it be super if they went one step further an aggregated & synchronized all your social data? It would be like Yahoo’s oneconnect or friendfeed for mobile – but native to your mobile OS.

By leveraging the cloud and aggregating all data, we could see some nifty new services that create the semantic web experience (or web 3.0) many have been talking about since the term “Web 2.0″ was coined.

Here we go again…  here are my 10 informed best guesses on what will happen in the Canadian market place this year. Click here to see how I did against last year’s predictions. 

1. It will be the year of the App store. Every manufacturer in the smartphone space will have a mobile application store, but Apple will continue to dominate the market because they are the only ones who focus on usability first
2. There will be several new models of the iphone announced and launched this year – including a “nano” version.  I predict that copy & paste will still not be among one of its many features
3. Palm Pre will do better than any Android device. Friends, peers and industry pals all mocked me for predicting that they would make a come back when I published some predictions in August, but I’m sticking with this one
4. Mobile security and privacy will become a big focus for marketers and the industry as more people use feature rich smart phones (25% of Canadians are already on them)
5. Mobile payment systems will finally reach retail as both MasterCard and Visa should be ready to go  
6. MMS will fail to reach its promise as the market shifts to the mobile web for richer experiences
7. Both Bell and Telus announce GSM compatibility / network infrastructure upgrades in order to get a piece of the lucrative GSM roaming market and to counter efforts by new regional and national carriers who will be entering the marketing in Q4
8. Microsoft will release a new OS for mobile that includes a 2d code reader that supports their own proprietary M-Tag.  This will finally bring 2d codes into the mainstream in North America
9. All major Canadian news / content websites will have a specific mobile enabled website
10. 40 Billion SMS messages will be sent in Canada – up from about the 20 Billion fore-casted in 2008.

What do you think? Feel free to comment /add your own predictions.

The Globe and Mail reported today that Microsoft is again talking to Yahoo. Get the full article here.

Seen largely as a way to counter any potential Google and Yahoo advertising partnership, a new Microsoft relationship would bolster their rating and access to the market while giving Yahoo shareholder value without raising too many regulatory eyebrows around anti-trust.

The long term play

Although still relatively small compared to the desktop web market, partnering with Yahoo now means Microsoft can also get access to their leading mobile platform.

Within two years mobile advertising in Canada will include inventory for marketers that will reach beyond Carrier on-deck portals. Already we are seeing early versions of mobile search (with proximity capabilities), mobile video, and mobile social networking sites with built-in ad-serving abilities. This market is going to be massive.

It also sets up the possibility of another takeover attempt in the not so distant future.

Many people buy Apple products because they are great fashion accessories.

The ultimate fashion accessory was big news last week as Steve Jobs announced the much anticipated SDK (software developer kit) for the iphone which will allow developers to create applications, utilities, and games leveraging the same platform Apple used to create their own widgets. Starting in June of this year, consumers won’t have to “jailbreak” their phone in order to customize it.

Also starting this June, enterprise users will no longer have to beg their I.T. / technical support department to open up the corporate email server to hackers and SPAM attacks in order for them to access their email from their nifty iphone.

The iphone will be getting some proper business chops.  

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As rumoured since 2006 and reported this morning by Engadget, Microsoft formally made an offer to buy Yahoo today. There is a long way to go from making an offer to actually acquiring & integrating Yahoo into Microsoft, but the concept of the two Web 1.0 companies getting together to battle the new world online order is intriguing.

The fact that Yahoo’s shares have also dropped around 15% year to date also means Microsoft probably saved around 5 billion by making an offer now.

Acquiring Yahoo is clearly a strategic play to counter the growing dominance of Google on the interweb which now includes an impressive lineup of “office” like applications available for free.  

Given Yahoo’s relative success in the mobile space and Microsoft’s investment in facebook last year, it looks like they have armed themselves for a good fight… but the question is, are they too late? 

Will the new Micro-hoo really be Micro-who before long? 

In the past few months we’ve been watching as Google, AOL, Yahoo, and Nokia have been making moves to extend or enter the mobile advertisting space.

Microsoft has decided to also join the party and has started placing ads on their U.S. MSN mobile page to follow efforts already made in Belgium, France, Spain, Japan, and the U.K.

The Bank of America will be one of the primary buyers of ad space – supporting their innovative mobile banking website and experience at bankofamerica.mobi. Paramount Pictures and Jaguar are the other two primary buyers.

Microsoft also plans to bring new features such as astrology, movie tickets through movietickes.com, ringtones, wallpaper, games and video clips on MSN Mobile via an agreement Microsoft has with Thumbplay.

Although Microsoft is late to the game, the mobile advertising space is still young and relatively small.  This is not like the nineties when Microsoft had to catch and kill Netscape who already dominated the browser market.  

I was catching up on my RSS feeds tonight and came across an update from a live blogging event, where it was announced that in addition to the fantastic iphone specific site, facebook has now released an application for BlackBerry. The application goes beyond the browsing experience and leverage’s the RIM platform. If you have neither an iphone nor BlackBerry (shame on you), you can still have a great mobile browse experience by going to m.facebook.com on your mobile device.

I went fishing for more information on this announcement and came across several announcements of pending platform improvements. Get ready for this – the three top items I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere are coming soon!

1) Newsfeed for your groups! You’ll be able to get content updates on your groups without having to visit them individually. This also likely means we’ll be able to send such updates as an RSS feed to our newsreaders – much like what the current netvibes module does today for your main profile page. I predict group participation and growth to explode as a result of this. 

2) Organize your friends (and colleagues)! Soon you’ll be able to categorize your friends and therefore have more control over what they see and how they interact with you. For those of us who have wished for a separation between personal and professional contacts, this is it. I know a few people who actually have two facebook profiles – one for their friends, and one for their professional network. This move will make it easier for people leverage the social graph for work and play.

3) Mobile platform - facebook Platform for Mobile is here allowing developers to extend their applications to work on mobile phones and devices as well.  I can hardly wait to see how developers and marketers will extend their applications to mobile.

Additionally, multi-language support is coming – which should allow the platform to finally catch on in non-English speaking countries.

Today was also an announcement that Microsoft has invested $240 million in facebook at a valuation of $15 billion (or 2% stake). This extends their existing relationship and  gives Microsoft the rights to sell ads on the facebook platform.  I wonder if they’ll extend the ad serving platform to the Mobile platform too….now that will be interesting!

Will this also give Microsoft the first right to buy facebook next year? Speculation will mount…but in the mean time i’m looking forward to some long-overdue platform updates.