The Berlinale in Berlin is over now – and some of the Hollywood celebrities are just moving on to GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: On Thursday, February 19th 2009, the winners of the MoFilm – Mobile Short Film Festivals will be awarded. Last year Robert Redford gave a keynote speech at the GSMA Mobile World Congress – this year the two-time Academy Award-winner Kevin Spacey will bring a touch of Hollywood-glamor to Barcelona.
Registered users can watch the preliminary short list of contenders for MOFILM 2009 over the internet. In my eyes the turbo-date episodes are really worth taking a look at
So we can be curious about the lucky winners who will receive the MoFilm award from Kevin Spacey on stage on Thursday.

Thanks to parakeet at Youtube, all of you how did not get the chance of joining to the Mobile Backstage event at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, yesterday. So if you like to watch Robert Redford talking about mobile shorts and Sundance, or the writers strike in Hollywood. will.i.am – member of the Black Eyed Peas talked about mobile music videos and about his 48-hour project Yes-We-Can-Song inspired by Obama. And will.i.am shares his personal insights about the power of fans with (camera)mobilephones. Maybe the mobile industry is waking up from it’s conservative sleep At the Samsung Party it was clear again that they know how to party!

Besides the well known top dogs in the mobile world, like Nokia and SonyEricsson we had one of the newcomers in our video walk through, yesterday. But that newcomer Garnim did not need to step to far from his core business as they are big in the GPS-handheld-device market. So it’s not a big issue for the mobile industry to classify their market entry.
Google, on the other hand, is not predictable in many dimensions: Open platforms, like the mobile OS called android, they are developing within the Open Handset Alliance, will be released as open source in the future. The mobile network operator smiled at open source projects in the past – or ignored them. Sometimes they even worked against these projects. The control over the (mostly subsidized) handsets should be in the hands of the operator. With android, everything should change and users should gain control over their own phone – like they did with their personal computer. That threatens the operators who are afraid of dropping SMS and speech telephony revenues because of VoIP and IM-clients on the new open handsets. But there is a chance of generating new forms of revenues.
At the MWC Google and the CPU manufacturer ARM give a first impression in the look and feel of the new android user interface. Here is an android Video of a reference design phone. It is powered by an ARM processor and is quite fast in user interaction. The asianmanufacturer E28 just used android as his chance and ported android on one of it’s handsets for the Congress. Here also: quite fast screen animation speed.
As Apple’s iPhone, also android will really change the mobile world

P.S. Deadline for the android Developer Challenge of Google awarding 10 Mio. $ in total is: April 14th 2008

Here is a short video walkthrough of the new handsets presented and other insight at the GSMA Mobile World Congress today:

Garnim Nuvifone … the Smartphone mixed with a personal GPS navigation device.

Nokia N96 … their new flagship product to compete with the iPhone: The Finnish leader in worldwide handset marketshares included the mobile TV standard DVB-H, a 16 GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot. Symbian S60 is running as the mobile Operating System. So it has a well functioning but oldfashioned userinterface – and there is tons of software out there. You can watch your videos or mobile TV at a glossy 2.8″ QVAG screen and can use nearly every connection you want: quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz) – with GPRS, HSDPA and EDGE support for high speed data connections, dual band WCDMA (900/2100MHz) – also called UMTS in Europe – and WiFi (802.11b/g). It even has a GPS-receiver built in.

SonyEricsson XPERIA X1 … the SonyEricsson people try to compete with the elegance of the Apple iPhone by using Windows Mobile and refurbishing the user interface. It’s equipped with a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and a glossy 3″ WVGA display, also a built in GPS-receiver. It works with a variety of GSM HSDPA/HSUPA networks as well as Wifi.
They created a inspiring ad for the XPERIA X1

… BTW … it’s the biggest event in the mobile inustry and everybody is talking about a company which isn’t even exhibiting there – Apple with it’s iPhone

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!