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For those lucky enough to escape the grey mono­tony of Lon­don last week (I was not so lucky) and escape to Bar­celona for the Mobile World Con­gress, they were in for a rare treat. In recent years the world’s largest mobile event has des­cen­ded into a rather dreary almost bor­ing lit­any of the same ol’ same ol’. This year appears to have been any­thing but…

Microsoft’s ebul­li­ent Steve Balmer lit­er­ally char­ging back into the fray with MS phone 7 which, I’m kinda shocked to say, seems to be get­ting rave reviews. Android show­ing its mettle with some decent look­ing kit like the new Motorola CLIQ XT and the inev­it­ably slick UI we’ve come to expect. In addi­tion, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s key­note on Google Goggles and the emer­ging aug­men­ted real­ityspace was great. Apple, in true brand fash­ion, deign­ing not to attend but still able to cause a monu­mental buzz with the run­away suc­cess of the AppStore. And Nokia? Des­pite the much-hyped but largely panned col­lab­or­a­tion with Intel on a new mobile OS called MeeGo, Nokia unveiled no new devices at all which is a first at MWC. Rather they chose to extol (or is that excuse?) the vir­tues of their Ovi store which seems unable to slow the gal­lop­ing suc­cess of AppStore. This piece of You­Tube bril­liance high­lights the com­mon perception.

As the mobile space seems, moment­ar­ily, to be fix­ated on applic­a­tions, MWC was awash with hun­dreds of com­pan­ies try­ing to muscle in. The recur­ring theme? A con­cern sur­round­ing the lack of stand­ards in the applic­a­tion space and the com­plex­ity that is caus­ing through­out the mobile eco­sys­tem. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, under­stand­ably, seem slow to adopt a com­mon stand­ard and all are try­ing to des­per­ately nur­ture a developer net­work to mimic Apple. How­ever, oper­at­ors and net­work pro­viders are try­ing to lasso developer com­munit­ies together (check out the Whole­sale Applic­a­tion Com­munity to see just how big that groundswell could become) in a dir­ect assault on Apple.

So des­pite the obvi­ous allure of Bar­celona at any time of the year, Mobile World Con­gress 2010 appears to have been a real barn­stormer. Two pre­dic­tions. MWC 2011 will def­in­itely be even more enga­ging as the mobile space con­tin­ues to evolve so fren­et­ic­ally. Lon­don weather in Feb­ru­ary 2011 will be just as shyte. I’ve begun beg­ging for my ticket already.

Ever since we held the last (and first) European Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit at Alti­tude last Novem­ber, we’ve had a thirst to do it all over again.

As part of the feed­back pro­cess on the last event, we asked what people thought of the day, the con­tent and speak­ers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the format of the event in the future and what top­ics they’d like to see covered.

Per­haps pre­dict­ably, it was the day’s agenda and cal­ibre of the speaker line-up that attrac­ted most people to the first event. Not to men­tion it was free to our invit­ees. Of course our speak­ers scored very highly, but com­ing away from the day almost all com­men­ted on how much they’d val­ued the oppor­tun­ity to net­work. I’m sure they found it cath­artic to share some pain and under­stand that oth­ers out there were try­ing to over­come the same hurdles.

Three key pieces of feed­back came through, which we’ve tried to listen to in put­ting together the agenda for the forth­com­ing summit:

1. People want more prac­tical con­tent and less of the the­or­et­ical. There’s an appet­ite for stor­ies of blood­ied knuckles, as well as a hun­ger for real learn­ings from people who’ve been there and done it. We were very con­scious not to make last year’s event a beauty parade of vendors and ensure it was client-side mar­keters telling their stor­ies. This time round we’re try­ing to encour­age our speak­ers to tell their suc­cess stor­ies, and what mis­takes they’d avoid the second time round. As an example, Shawn Burns from SAP is com­ing along to tell the story of how he and other mar­keters trans­formed sap.com from a largely bro­chure­ware site to a ‘demand gen­er­a­tion machine’. Good stuff.

2. Attendees wanted more oppor­tun­ity to net­work and learn from their peers. We had some great table con­ver­sa­tions at lunch­time last time round, and we tried to allow gen­er­ous breaks. For the most part people res­isted the lure of their Black­Ber­ries, made con­ver­sa­tion and benefited immensely. This time round we’ve gone a bit fur­ther and we’ve made the after­noon ses­sions entirely inter­act­ive. Attendees will have the oppor­tun­ity to attend three out of four work­shops on social media, accel­er­at­ing sales, using web­cast­ing and online video, and meas­ur­ing and optim­ising cam­paigns. We’re going to have people cap­tur­ing learn­ings from one group to another so that through the course of the after­noon we gen­er­ate a body of know­ledge which can then be shared with all attendees afterwards.

3. In terms of the con­tent, there was a lot of call for tips on mak­ing the most of a credit-crunched budget, using social media and prov­ing a return on mar­ket­ing activ­ity. Our first speaker of the day, Jim Cas­sidy, is an ex IBM mar­keter now at European com­pany Step­Stone. In his pre­vi­ous life with a budget of mil­lions, his greatest chal­lenge used to be how to spend mar­ket­ing budget fast enough. He’s now in a pos­i­tion where every penny (cent) has to be accoun­ted for. Jim will talk about what he’s pri­or­it­ising, how he’s mak­ing a case for spend with the board, and how he’s mak­ing his mar­ket­ing assets sweat. We’ve also got a great panel line up, led by Cisco’s Amanda Job­bins. They’re going to give their take on some of these topics.

So hope­fully that gives you some­thing of a taster for what’s to come on the 30^th April. If you need any more encour­age­ment, the venue we’ve chosen this time is simply stun­ning — a private member’s club at the top of Centrepoint.

About time you registered I think: www.demandgenerationsummit.com

Remem­ber, we’re only accept­ing regis­tra­tions from client-side mar­keters from the B2B ser­vices, tech­no­logy and tele­coms sec­tors. No offence inten­ded to oth­ers, but demand for places is extremely high.

Hope­fully see you there.

P.S. If you’re of the twit­ter­ing kind, you can get reg­u­lar updates by fol­low­ing us at www.twitter.com/demandgentweet or sub­scrib­ing to the RSS feed

I con­fess. Mine is one of the anim­ated voices debat­ing the future of Apple in the mobile phone industry. But I’m the heretic deny­ing that we’re wit­ness­ing the birth of the Mobile Mes­siah. I have much love for Apple (even if sit typ­ing this on a Sony Vaio). They have a knack of dis­rupt­ing mar­kets through intel­li­gent and beau­ti­ful design. And the desirab­il­ity of their brand is second to none. So they should be well placed to thrive in the mobile phone busi­ness. Right?

At the risk of being burned at the stake, I believe not. There is noth­ing in the iPhone launch announce­ment to sug­gest it will cre­ate mar­ket dis­rup­tion. Sure, the iPhone looks beau­ti­ful. The user exper­i­ence looks prom­ising (unless you like tex­ting one handed). And yes, it can do clever things. But noth­ing dis­rupt­ive. Noth­ing to unsettle the status quo in the way iTunes unsettled the music industry. Noth­ing so dif­fer­ent that you can’t wait for the end of your con­tract before bin­ning your exist­ing hand­set. And noth­ing to war­rant the enorm­ous pri­cing bur­den the iPhone will have to carry.

Apple are facing stiff com­pet­i­tion this time. Nokia, Motorola, Sam­sung and Sony Eric­sson may not all have the cache of Apple, but they are much beefier brands than the rag bag of com­pet­it­ors Apple white­washed in the MP3 mar­ket. How­ever, my heretic view is not foun­ded on the rel­ev­ant strengths of phone brands (even though we do work for Nokia). It is based on the dynam­ics of the industry. Among Nokia’s many reas­ons for suc­cess are their rela­tion­ships with net­work oper­at­ors around the world, their supreme global logist­ics oper­a­tion, and their sheer eco­nomy of scale. Apple have none of these. Someone put me right here, but Apple are not exactly renowned for their part­ner­ship skills either? I can only ima­gine the scene when they real­ise the net­work oper­at­ors have a com­pul­sion for instruct­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers which fea­tures must go into their next product.

Of course, many of the faith­ful will queue overnight to sat­isfy their addic­tion to own all things shiny and Apple. At the launch, Mr Jobs proudly reminded devotees that there are 100 mil­lion iPods in the world. He omit­ted to men­tion the two bil­lion Nokia mobile devices in the world, with the Finns adding to them at a rate of 350 mil­lion in 2006 alone.

So if you guys in Cuper­tino aren’t real­ist­ic­ally expect­ing to take on Hel­sinki, what are you expect­ing to do? Is this a defens­ive manœuvre against MP3 play­ers in phones? If it is, you are one tardy bunch of Cali­for­ni­ans. Or is it the real­isa­tion that much of your future busi­ness will be wrapped up in mobile computing…of which voice com­mu­nic­a­tion is a crit­ical com­pon­ent? Or are you hid­ing an industry dis­rup­tion up your sleeve which will yet turn the entire mar­ket upside down?

I guess whatever your answer, it will be a reflec­tion of your faith.

Pipex has announced its second com­mer­cial trial of WiMAX in the UK. This is great news. Well it is if you live in War­wick. Oh and work for War­wick Coun­cil. You’ll be able to get an 8meg con­nec­tion wherever you roam (within War­wick that is). They also plan to roll out the trial to those out­side the coun­cil as well as to that digital hot­bed, Leam­ing­ton Spa.

WiMAX is often talked about as the holy grail of last mile / ubi­quit­ous con­nectiv­ity. The abil­ity to have a robust broad­band con­nec­tion wherever, whenever. We’ve already covered Singa­pore’s plans to offer full WiMAX cov­er­age to every single per­son and busi­ness by 2015. It’s an ambi­tious plan and has some way to go (espe­cially if like me, users can’t get speeds over 20 kB/sec when down­load­ing from their site).

What I like about the Singa­pore approach is that there is a clear vis­ion behind it. A sense of the greater good such a pro­gramme can achieve. Pipex’s, by com­par­ison, seems to be all about tech­nical feas­ib­il­ity and com­mer­cial viab­il­ity. These are both good things, of course, and to be expec­ted from a com­mer­cial organ­isa­tion. They’re just not that excit­ing (and the pro­spect of the ser­vice being pro­moted even­tu­ally by David Hassle­hoff frankly makes me a little nauseous).

But, you have to hope the pro­gramme is a suc­cess and spurs other pro­viders to launch sim­ilar plans. And the pro­spect of high-quality ubi­quit­ous con­nectiv­ity is excit­ing. Of course, if you’ve paid out mil­lions on a 3G license, it might be a little less so.

Sources: Telecoms.com (regis­tra­tion required) and The Register

Singa­pore will have wall-to-wall WiFi by the end of the year. No more look­ing for a friendly Star­bucks or try­ing to leech off an unpro­tec­ted wire­less router, simply boot and go (well that’s the plan). This ini­ti­at­ive is part of a wider effort (the Intel­li­gent Nation pro­gramme) which extends into many gov­ern­ment ser­vices and which is look­ing to line Singa­pore up with the world’s tech élite nations.

Now, all they need is a sub­scrip­tion music ser­vice and some WiFi-enabled play­ers.

Source: news.com