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

It was quite interesting to watch a presentation at the MobileMonday in Munich of Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO of gofresh.de the creators of the mobile off-portal community itsmy.com.
They did an amazing job over the last five years in growing their mobile community and now, itsmy.com and an other German based portal called Peperonity.com are some of the bigges mobile off-portal communities in the US besides Fotochatter.com and Flirtomatic.com. Really amazing.
To make one thing clear: from a designers standpoint, it’s hard to believe that all of them are working, because it really reminds me to the times of C-64 … but they work

Google is running fast forward with the Mobile-Handset-Operating-System, called android, they are developing with the joint forces of the Open Handset Mobile Alliance. To attract the creativity of developers worldwide, they started a competition – or as Google likes to see it as the Android Developer Challenge. Google will provide 10 Million $ in awards for the best applications. So it might really be interesting for some developers out there – may be great seed capital for a new startup
Yesterday, on January 28, Google extended the deadline for the first round in the Android Developer Challenge to April 14 2008. There will be a second challenge when the first handsets ship. And those first android handsets should ship in the second half of 2008.
So, get your mobile applications on track

The people at Skyhook Wireless really did a smart job with their Wi-Fi Positioning System: They just use the highly distributed public and private Wi-Fi infrastructure of everyone as reference points for their location tracking. So basically every WiFi-enabled device can use their technology if Skyhook Wireless scanned and located the hotspots that specific area.
I did not find any competitors, yet. Sure, there are companies like innerwireless with their PanGo location management software, or Cisco with their Wireless Location Appliance, or the Finnish ekahau working in the field of Wi-Fi locating technology. But they all focus on closed business solutions where a dedicated infrastructure is used for tracking.
So the Skyhook Wireless WPS solution looks like an innovative and unique way – and an interesting way to realize navigation and location based services in metropolitan areas. Opening up their API for web developers was a brilliant idea – so let’s use it.

No need for handheld GPS devices which do not function properly in metropolitan areas