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Written by Rudy De Waele and edited by Richard MacManus. Note: this is a Mobile Web focused excerpt from Rudy’s complete wrapup of the 3GSM World Congress, held recently in Barcelona.
One of the things I realized during the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation is happening everywhere and a lot of start-up companies are working in the mobile web area; while still in its very early stage, the mobilisation of the web is happening.
Google vice-president and chief Internet evangelist Vinton G. Cerf – also one of the founding fathers of the Internet – predicted Tuesday that mobile phones, not personal computers, will fuel the growth of the worldwide Web, as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly.
The mobilisation of the web was an important part of the discussions during 3GSM. Mike Rowehl and Carlo Longino wrote on this already; also read Michael Mace’s interesting take on this subject.
The content hall (Hall 7) of the exhibition was filled with a lot of mobile adult (Sign ‘O’ the Times?) and web companies resolutely going mobile including Yahoo. Shozu won for the 2nd time in a row the prize for Most Innovative Mobile Application or Content Award with its Mobile MultiMedia Delivery Platform. To me Shozu is one of the truly real great mobile integrated applications, but isn’t this a sign that no other great innovative applications are around, or haven’t been noticed by the organizers, or maybe have not been found worthy or mature to market yet?
This 3GSM was definately too early for the many mobile 2.0 (web) companies. Many of them need to work harder on their business models; they may try to go around the operators, but I think that over the next couple of years start-ups need to combine their innovative ideas and technology to work with the network operators, to deploy compelling new services – supposing these become available for the masses with affordable fees of course. In any case, this show didn’t have any sign of partnering mobile 2.0 companies yet, but hopefully we can expect some changes next year.
Operators now seem to realise that the top down content models are not working – people need content to consume and to play with. Vodafone seems to have understood this ahead of its competitors, and they announced some remarkable breakthrough deals. With European markets fully saturated with mobile telephones, Vodafone sees India as a key area for potential growth – see Vodafone’s $11.1 billion acquisition of India’s Hutchinson Essar. On the services side, Vodafone concluded deals with YouTube and MySpace. Nokia, on the other hand will offer YouTube content through a web browser and its new Nokia Video Centre, over mobile video RSS feeds. You can check all 20 Nokia press releases released during 3GSM thanks to Stefan at RingNokia.
3UK announced that Windows Live Messenger is now provided as a rich instant messenger mobile software client, allowing 3 customers to see the “presence” of their Messenger contacts and exchange messages when on the move with 3 mobile.
In the Mobile Search field I missed a panel with Daniel Appelquist – one of the real mobile illuminates I met during 3GSM, but you can read a good review here at MoCoNews. Another session I had to miss due to the many meetings was the Technology Breakout session on Mobile Web 2.0 moderated by Ajit Jaokar with Jon von Tetzchner – CEO Opera Software, Alex Kummerman – CEO Clicmobile and David Wood – VP Research at Symbian. Alex sent me a link where you can view the session presentations. Also interesting was the transcription of Tim Berners Lee’s keynote at 3GSM by Ajit.
To close, a note that Second Life will soon be accessible from your mobile phone. According to MarketingVox and Reuters’ Second Life bureau software from Comverse Technology will enable Second Life residents to visit the virtual world from their Java-enabled mobile devices. The software was developed over the last six months, well before the open-sourcing of the Second Life client, and relies on using a separate PC or server as an intermediary. Comverse has also created an application that allows Second Life to run on IPTV platforms. (picture from Reuters)
Thanks Rudy for the 3GSM coverage. Head over to his blog for full details about the conference.
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Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)