Last week I spent three foot slogging days in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress. It was disappointing. Part of the attraction was the appearance of Robert Redford talking about the convergence between business and entertainment through the mobile web. Except nobody cared. In typical Hollywood fashion, they positioned Redford’s appearance as a ‘rare event’ but what they also did was locate the entertainment ’section’ of the congress at the top of the hill above the main event at the Barcelona Palace. The only way to get there was via (I lost count) the number of stairways and even then, no=one turned up. When we reached the event, a room capable of holding 300 was pretty much empty. What a let down. But that was indicative of much of the show where the emphasis was on shiny new toys and not, as I had hoped, business applications of merit.
There were a few interesting examples but even the innovation centre was poorly attended. The 5 minute demo showcase attracted maybe a 100 people. It was embarrassing. A couple of the presenters did a good job but most were clueless about pitching in less than 300 seconds. I like the concept behind Soonr, which seeks to act as a cloud based secure storage and retrieval system to rival the likes of box.net. With $15 million in backing, some coming from the likes of Cisco, it should be a success. When can we see it in action? Anyone’s guess. They’re piloting in Denmark. I spoke with the company’s CEO, Patrick McVeigh who says the target customer is the SMB with possibly 50 employees but they expect to see distribution coming from the big telcos and network operators. If that’s the case then it’s almost certain to be a failure. The telco industry has shown itself almost incapable of marketing beyond airtime. I have no reason to believe it will get any better, anytime soon.
One small shining star for me was Masabi. They’ve taken the pragmatic route of developing secure mobile applications for the 90 per cent of people who don’t have the latest iPhone, Nokia N95 or the soon to be realeased N96. I like what this company is doing but along with many others, it is solving problems one piece at a time. Nowhere was there a concerted effort to solve problems in a packaged manner. My ZDNet colleague Matthew Miller got excited by Yahoo! oneConnect but I can’t share his enthusiasm. As I said over at my ZDNet blog:
But who will use it? The latest figures say Nokia sold 7 million N95’s out of a total 1 billion mobile units shipped in 2007. That doesn’t register as a market leader. More important, will it actually work? Matthew thinks so but if it is anything like the YahooGo service then it will need more development effort. I have YahooGo on my N95. While the interface is great, it has a tough time loading when accessed via our GPRS network. Most of the time it fails. I hope that Yahoo! is watching out for this problem. Even assuming Nokia gains more traction, will oneConnect be limited to ‘edge’ cases like us?
This is the problem. The industry seems obsessed with shiny new toys and half baked solutions instead of thinking about where the real money lays – business apps – and giving them the support they deserve.
One interesting aside. I attended an evening party at a law office. We were told this was aimed at startups but when we arrived, the place was swarming with ’suits.’ If I’d been looking for funds, (they had a couple of marketers flogging their angel investor wares hard,) then I would have been terrified. Sitting around the very expensive conference table in even more expensive leather chairs sipping beer out of wine glasses and gazing at the view from the 20th floor, you just know that if you’re there looking for funding, then you’ll likely walk out with your head handed on a platter. Professional advisors need do a much better job presenting themselves as friends of the startup. That’s not how it’s done.
