The GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the ultimate event in the global mobile industry: If you want to meet the global mobile communication leaders – it’s Barcelona and not Davos you have to be
But it’s not only about business. It’s also about fun – if you get into the right party at night. The artist and celebrity “density” at these events was high in the past – but as the mobile industry is developing towards a mobile content and media industry the artists even become part of the congress.
Years ago, when the congress was situated in Cannes, the Congress invited the science fiction author Douglas Adams to get a new perspective on the mobile industry.
But this time they go much much further and invited artists like will.i.am, producer, artist and founder of The Black Eyed Peas to share their view of the mobile music developments. Or the Hollywood legend, founder of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, Sundance Channel, and the most recent of the brand’s entertainment companies, Sundance Cinemas, Robert Redford who will share his insights of the role of mobile in the short film genre. Or watch the Isabella Rosselini and Jody Shapiro presenting a case study on “Mobile Meets Film”.
So if you are attending the Mobile World Congress on February 13th 2008 in Barcelona – you have to go to the Mobile Backstage event at the National Palace (Palau Nacional).

P.S. For all of you who did not see will.i.am’s 48-hour work yet … until now more than 3 Million visitors watched his Barack-Obama support music video on Youtube yet. Remarkable!

It’s quite interesting to go into the browser / OS marketshare statistics Net Applications is gathering.
Within the last 12 months, the marketshare of Apple Mac OS X powered computers increased from 6.38% in Feb 2007 to 7.57% in Jan 2008 – a growth rate of about 19%. This great news for the Mac community – but what’s really surprising is the significant marketshare of iPhone surfers in the last month. The iPhone was introduced to the US market on June 29th 2007 – and in Jan 2008 it’s internet surfer worldwide market share is 0.13% according to the Net Applications. Focussing only on the US market it’s share is even higher at 0.20%!
It looks like the iPhone really fuels the use of mobile internet.

Source: Net Applications

If you can trust the Apple job postings the first retail Apple Store won’t be located in the German capital Berlin – but in the beautiful city of Munich Wonderful: finally a Genious-Bar nearby!
There is just one open question – will the rumors prove right, that the flagship store will be situated directly in the center of Munich at the Marienplatz?

[Update] Today, Georg Albrecht, head of PR Apple Germany, confirmed, that the first German Apple Flagship Store will be located in Munich.

Sources & Graphic: Apple and fscklog

A short message to all WordPress-bloggers: The actual security update version 2.3.3 is strongly recommended. Here at codedifferent no problems occure while upgrading.
Taking this upgrade as an opportunity – the anti spam plugin was also exchanged: In the future every commentator at codedifferent has to prove to be a pattern recognizing human. And by using the reCAPTURE-plugin we aditionally help others: The CAPCHA codes used here are not only some generated graphics – they represent words which could not be recognized by OCR-software. reCAPCHA was developed from Carnegie Mellow University and they actually support the project Internet Archive.

That’s a big one: It really looks like Steve Ballmer want’s to get into the search engine and online advertisement market. Today, Microsoft announced, that the company proposes the acquisition of Yahoo! at a premium of 63% to the current trading price.
It’s a teamup for competing Google – but we’ll have to see whether this transaction will be allowed by the anti-trust authorities and whether joining the forces of Microsoft and Yahoo! development teams will lead to innovation as they want it to be.
How should we call that company in the future? Microhoo!?

P.S. I hope they’ll now hire Ms. Dewey for the future Microhoo! search engine

[Update] You can vote for your favorite name of Microhoo at engadget