Attending this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I was interested to see how things have evolved since they moved the event from Cannes three years ago.

While in the first year pretty much the whole event collapsed over lunchtime when the masses tried to get something from the totally overwhelmed and inefficiently operated food stands, things are much improved now. Although annoying service levels at some places - like the business center or the hourly meeting room organizations - can still be experienced. I guess we need to simply live with them.

On the positive side of things was the crowd control at the Fast Track lane that allowed pre-registered attendees to actually move relatively fast.

In terms of exhibitors, some companies did not show up this year and probably decided they could better invest their money elsewhere. I also expected Google to have a booth but once again they were only present with a meeting room in the hospitality suite area.

Nice move was to expand the exhibition further up the hill where e.g. T-Mobile International had a great tent installed where not only drinks and little snacks were free but also free Wifi access was provided. They filled this existing gap nicely - not offering this for free on the exhibition campus was IMHO a joke. I guess the organizers just tried to suck out more money from everybody. As I was told an internet connection cost 900 £ per day.

One trend seems for countries to sponsor exhibition space for their tech companies. This year they had Canada, Hungary, Scotland, Ireland, UK, Sweden, Norway, France, Israel and Spain stands. France appeared to be the biggest with many more companies, and on a larger space too, while Sweden looked to me as the most frequented one.

Technology-wise one can see that the industry is a bit lacking the BIG leap forward and, with the entrance of Apple's iPhone and probably also with Google's success in the US in getting an open access mobile network (see outcome of the recent FCC auction), "outsiders" are pushing things forward. Overall, the industry is optimistic and the memories of the self-inflicted financial disaster that most vendors and operators experienced due to the huge R&D and spectrum-license costs of UMTS seem to be slowly evaporating. Still, anyone who can show technology or solutions that allow operators or vendors to save costs and operate more efficiently will find an open ear. The "reduce churn, increase ARPU, lower cost talk" is real, even if it becomes quite boring after you have heard the exact same thing from the 200th or so company you talked to. Marketing needs to be more creative and use new tools to bring the message across. It is BTW not one message only but several for many buyer personas ,and this is what I personally took with me from this show, i.e. that only the companies who can talk to each one of their target customers ranging from techies all the way to the C-level will succeed. Who does not do this will join the companies that we have NOT seen anymore this year at the show, whatever happened to them...

Creativity can also be a quite personal taste as you can see with this company here. It got the attention of people at least, but I won't comment any further.

I've been in Boston this week visiting the WiMAX World conference.

This is supposed to be the biggest such event in the world currently and Boston's World Trade Center was a good location for it - also size-wise not too big. Watching the scene and talking to many on the exhibition floor, I somehow had my own thoughts on the current state of (not WiMAX) the wireless 3G market and its proponents. The joke of the event was without a doubt a Siemens VP reminding the audience of the fact that UMTS has millions of users already and therefore WiMAX would have to arrange itself and co-exist with it. Now let's look at some facts that this gentlemen leaves open in his PR talks either through not knowing better or through fear of losing his job:

• UMTS is one of the most complex communication technologies I could think of. Based on ATM and a super complex signaling architecture it cost the big vendors hundreds of millions to develop and roll out the technology. Joke number one of course is the fact that Siemens e.g. has not even managed to develop a product on their own but is reselling NEC's equipment. With the Nokia merger it is to be expected that Nokia's product will be the joint offering.
• Now what can the UMTS handheld owner expect from this in terms of really usuable service? Nothing. I could not think of one single practical service that UMTS would be capable of supporting. This is the other big joke of course. With a GSM/GPRS phone I can make phone calls everywhere and download text e-mails. Surfing the web or download attachments is practically impossible to do. While UMTS is a bit faster in real world scenarios than GPRS it is still by far too slow to allow me fast Internet access or to download attachments in a practically useable amount of time. In short, all those billions that operators have spent for spectrum licenses and installing UMTS infrastructure do NOT add any really practical services to end users.
• So why are operators and most major vendors still hestitant to roll out WiMAX? It is entirely political. How do you want to explain that you have just sunk billions when now a technology (WiMAX) is available that together with GSM can do what UMTS is unable to deliver, for a fraction of the costs, and can do NOW? Full phone coverage and at the same time high-speed data access - so that finally people can really surf the Internet fast and download attachments on their mobile devices - is now possible with a GSM/WiMAX combo. Of course, operators and vendors cannot explain this, and that's the reason why the marketing/sales machines of operators spend their budgets on promoting UMTS handsets and "services" and hope to continue to fool more and more end users. They have been partly successful since many people are simply unable to look beyond the hype. But I think that we will also see more and more end users who will ask themself why they should pay more for a UMTS phone when it cannot add anything more or offer better practical services.
• So the VP from Siemens should indeed be scared since here too, just as in other markets, the customers will decide - and they will do just that at the end of the day, when they have a choice. That choice is coming with WiMAX and it is coming strong and fast...