Barcelona

Thomas Husson | February 11, 2007, 03:37 PM

Back from the French West Indies, I landed yesterday in Paris where the outside temperature was 5ºC after having experienced a water at 26ºc in some nice blue lagoons...

Hopefully the tempeature in Barcelona is warmer. After a long taxi queue (up to 57,000 visitors are expected at 3GSM this year!), I finally managed to find my hotel, which has no Internet/WiFi connection contrary to what the organizer / LSO promoted on their hotel description. At least it is located right in the historical center (I booked as early as December) and Barcelona is by far more interesting to visit than Cannes...

I was not given a press pass this year, but I still do receive around 200 PR a day, which I hadn´t the time to read through yet.

Anyway, what will be the breaking news in this year congress? I summarized last year´s "pilgrimage" around 3 key themes: mobile TV, mobile broadband and VoIP, mobile search. No doubt these themes will remain key issues this year again with upgraded versions of HSDPA and more interest in HSUPA (the uplink allowing consumers to upload content from their handsets to the network). The latter will be all the more important given the current hype with Consumer-Created Content. MySpace finally announced its long awaited deal with a mobile operator in Europe (Vodafone, which also announced a deal with YouTube). I am still surprised that the deal is exclusive (even though I haven´t seen any mention of the exclusivity length yet) since it would be in the interest of Fox Interactive Media to reach the widest audience possible. I guess it is a way for Vodafone to differentiate itself from competitors and that they are ready to pay for this (if I remember well this was already the case for the 24'mobisodes produced by Fox but without Kiefer Sutherland)...

Mobile social networking is likely to be a very hot topic this year. However, I am interested to see how it will interact with the social adress book embedded in phones/SIMs and how it will be charged (data pricing on mobile networks). Indeed, my view is that the business model is very different from that of the Internet, relying more on messaging and data than on advertising. For consumers, the benefit is also very different: it is more about interacting/exchanging than taking the time to create and view content (why not use a PC screen and keyboard to do so?).

Anyway beyond the traditional winter collections that will be presented by handset manufacturers (with a huge billboard from Samsung to promote its latest F700 Ultra, a slim handset with qwerty keypad, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 5 megapixel with autofocus and a touchscreen UI...), the good news is that for once, entertainment may overshadow technology. A whole hall is dedicated to entertainment and content companies. The MEF party, the Sundance film festival with Bollywood short films and keynotes from Edgar Bronfman (CEO of Warner) as well as Bill Roedy (CEO of MTV Networks International) will certainly be among the main attractions of the show. This is a positive news for the industry, trying for once to move away from technology acronyms.

More to come this week once I´ll have read all this PR, seen some demos and attended several briefings...