What to expect at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2013
MWC is the largest mobile trade show with more than 65,000 people expected to attend this year in Barcelona’s Fira Gran Via and an opportunity for the mobile industry to showcase its latest phones, tablets, apps and services.
Connected Cities is likely to take a centre stage at MWC expanding on the connected home and car concepts from last year. It is estimated that by 2020, there will be 25 billion connected devices, and at least half will be connected by mobile technology which is an estimate regularly being revised upwards.
Examples will include a connected bike that monitors performance, remote health monitoring, intelligent logistics services and smart technology becoming the hub of the home, and in-car services that change the way we consume information on the move. The global operators will be positioning themselves as vital partners in order to extend their relationship with the end customers.
Device and Platform vendors are increasingly moving away from MWC for product launches. Apple has never exhibited and last year sent out the invite for the new iPad product launch during MWC. Samsung will be exhibiting but will not be launching their Galaxy S4 at the event.
Google and its mobile operating system Android will not be exhibiting this year for a change but will be supporting its partners and device manufacturers and with the growing Android domination it doesn’t really need to push its brand like it has at previous events.
Blackberry also don’t seem to be exhibiting according to the GSMA exhibition list, launching the BB10 on January 31st this would have been a good opportunity to get their smartphones out on show. The third place spot in the OS wars is still available and likely to see Microsoft, BB and even Mozilla’s Firefox OS continue to battle for this position.
Mobile payments will be in the spotlight at MWC, the wallet is becoming more than just payments and including loyalty, advertising and offers. Announcements from online players, financial companies, retailers and operators are expected as they battle for prime position in this space. For NFC to succeed both handsets and merchants will need enabled NFC terminals, with the slow rate of adoption and no Apple support it is no longer expected to be the main out-of-band payment method and likely to have a slow death in my view but interesting to see the GSMA select four partners for mobile contactless payment experience for 3,500 delegates at MWC who will receive a Xperia smartphone provided by Sony.
Rich Communication Services (RCS) is an industry initiative to harmonize rich address books and offer enhanced messaging and voice, video calling and the ability to share documents and photos simultaneously during calls. Joyn is the consumer facing brand for RCS and was officially announced at last year’s MWC by GSMA with a new version of the specification. DT recently reported implementation problems, deployments in Spain have gone very quiet and the PR machine has already started with SK Telecoms claiming 1m subscribers to Joyn, which is very timely.
In the consumerization of IT, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a phrase that has become widely adopted to refer to employees who bring their own devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops to the workplace for access to corporate data. The demand to secure corporate data across a wider range of mobile platforms will continue at MWC and now focus more on improving productivity with enterprise applications, platforms to develop, test and deploy apps with application stores to distribute the apps within the enterprise. New entrants to the enterprise mobility market and more product announcements should be expected. As more data is consumed with smartphones in the enterprise a wider range of tools and services to monitor and track usage, set polices and compress data in some cases will emerge.
You can keep up to date on the developments at MWC 2013 and hear more of my views via Twitter – Sandeep_r
Sandeep Raithatha 