A cynic's guide to Mobile World Congress 2016
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As presented to an Interactive Scotland breakfast meeting in March 2016. On reflection, MWC tends to reflect the current state of "mobile" more than giving an eye to the future. A cynical person (such as the author) would suggest that the conference offers little guidance - but read between the lines and you can see quite a lot.
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A cynic's guide to Mobile World Congress 2016
- 1. A cynic’s guide to MWC 2016 David Low Developer Advocate
- 2. Introduction
- 4. Slogans
- 5. Slogans
- 6. Slogans
- 7. Slogans
- 8. MWC asks a question rather than answers it Does mobile know what it is?
- 9. Punters’ eye view of the exhibition
- 10. Punters’ eye view of the exhibition
- 11. Punters’ eye view of the exhibition
- 12. Punters’ eye view of the exhibition
- 13. Punters’ eye view of the exhibition
- 14. Punters’ eye view of the exhibition
- 15. Punters’ eye view of the exhibition
- 17. What is Mobile anyway?
- 18. What is Mobile anyway?
- 19. What is Mobile anyway?
- 20. What is Mobile anyway?
- 21. What is Nokia anyway?
- 22. What is Nokia anyway?
- 23. What is Nokia anyway?
- 24. The state of the mobile industry
- 25. The next billion
- 26. Have a look at the most popular apps
- 27. Facebook - the weather vane of MWC
- 28. Facebook’s 2016 MWC Virtual Reality - Oculus Rift at consumer friendly prices - Finding ways to make VR useful - and “one of the killer apps for 5G” - “Dreamed of virtual reality since I was a teenager” Internet.org - Announced at a previous MWC - connecting the ‘next billion’ somehow - “We just want to help people get on the Internet” Artificial Intelligence - Talked about how AI is basically pattern matching, and very powerful - Talked down the possibility of AI taking over the world - more practical than that
- 29. The next billion and Facebook
- 30. The previous billion and Facebook
- 32. The previous billion and Facebook “I always like to rewind to what people did before technology. Before the web era, we just had conversations.” – David Marcus, head of Messenger
- 33. The previous billion and Facebook
- 34. Facebook and the next billion
- 35. Odds and ends
- 36. Odds and ends
- 37. Odds and ends
- 38. Conclusion
- 39. Edinburgh • Glasgow • Singapore • Beijing • Miami • Barcelona • Budapest • Sofia • London Thank you
Editor's Notes
- So Geoff has given you a very good look at MWC, some of the highlights and the history - I tend to take a pretty cynical view of these things so wanted to come at this from a different angle. These views are mine and not necessarily those of Skyscanner :)
- But before dragging things down, I just wanted to say on behalf of Skyscanner, thanks to the various teams from Scotland who put our stand together and organised everything so well, before and during the conference week. There were a few tired faces on the Friday morning flight back to Edinburgh - including my own - so I trust everyone got a well-deserved drink to finish things off.
- But on with the talk. This year’s theme was “Mobile is Everything”, and in a way that sums up everything that’s wrong with the industry just now.
- In previous years the theme has ranged from things like last year’s “Edge of Innovation”, which was probably nearer the truth
- to “Creating What’s Next”
- “The New Mobile Horizon”
- And maybe most pertinent, “Redefining Mobile” in 2012. They should maybe use that one every year because that’s really what this year’s conference, and most of them, ought to be about.
- From this year’s event, it’d be hard to tell what ‘mobile’ even means. I’m indebted to the good users of Pinterest to make my job a bit easier with this presentation, and the “MWC Slogans” board they created during the conference. This is a Nokia poster seen outside the building, lord knows what point it tried to make.
- Can anyone tell what Akazoo offers? It’s basically a clone of Spotify.
- Zyncro is an enterprise social network. I wouldn’t imagine that collaboration has ever been anti-social, but there you are.
- Excuse the language in this one.
- Tektronix provides testing solutions to ‘accelerate the connected world’. As the user says, you wouldn’t want it much slower.
- On a similar theme - the user says it all for me. At a mobile conference full of testing and high-bandwidth equipment, you can’t get any form of signal for love nor money.
- Or my personal favourite - a company called AppLift - who had a two floored stand and only stairs. They missed out on a great gimmick, installing a lift would probably be cheaper than renting the venue wifi for a week.
- Away from the silliness though, there are some concrete examples to show that mobile can’t really decide what’s next.
- We had 360 degree cameras. Announced many times previously but still haven’t really taken off yet. That one looks like Luke Skywalker’s training robot from the proper Star Wars.
- How about a motorbike with a drone flying out in front? I’ll come back to that one too.
- Or a connected toothbrush which gives you feedback on your technique?
- Or a well known fashion brand punting a smart watch?
- Or Nokia, which has been more of a victim of recent mobile industry growth - but still with clearly deep pockets when it needs to. This is the gargantuan Nokia stand at MWC.
- They’re trying to do a bit of everything without really knowing which one to pick up. And all under the banner “make tech human”.
- The one thing you won’t see on the stand - in any meaningful way - is a mobile phone. Nokia is clearly trying to figure out the next mobile revolution, same as the rest of us.
- I like to think about it like this - rather than showcasing the future, Mobile World Congress tends to reflect the mood of the industry today. The examples I’ve shown you from the conference show you that mobile as an industry, isn’t really what most of us probably thought it was. The days of talking about apps and devices are gone - for the last year years it’s become about simply making everything mobile and portable.
- What that has allowed is a huge growth in smartphone adoption round the world. By 2020, 80% of the world’s adults will have a smart phone.
- But that growth has largely been driven by switching things we did anyway. Most email is sent and received on phones. Most use of social media is on phones and the most used apps across all app stores and devices, are social. You could argue that mobile drove social media but it was growing anyway.
- You can get a good view of the industry - and MWC itself - by watching what Facebook announce, and what Mark Zuckerberg says. He’s invited to MWC pretty much every year to do a keynote or a fireside chat, or something similar.
- But what did they actually announce at MWC? A map of the world created using AI to spot patterns of human movement - to see exactly where people spend their time. The purpose of this? To help enable Facebook’s wish to connect the next billion users. So they don’t fly drones and balloons over places with no people.
- And of course they showed off some VR for people lucky enough to be in the room watching live. All good fun but without a real sense of what it’s for. Gaming perhaps, but plenty other people are doing that too. What does it add to a mobile user? Or are we throwing away the previous definition of “mobile” and take it to mean “connected?
- And what does that mean to the ‘first billion’ and what they want from mobile? It has to be more than using Facebook on the train - or in the living room on the phone that replaced the laptop, that replaced the PC.
- Although they didn’t talk about it at MWC, one of Facebook’s biggest projects is Messenger - from a few installs to 700 million in 18 months. And now they want to make it the platform of choice for that ‘first billion’. Using AI and other things to personalise conversations with ‘bots’. Similar to things Google has been doing for a while with Google Now.
- Again it wasn’t announced this year but in many markets Facebook can’t get new users, even though they have smartphones, because bandwidth is too scarce or too expensive. They launched Facebook Lite in the past year to reflect that. It’s clear Facebook are making lots of bets just now but don’t really know where it’s all going.
- And if we go back to MWC 2012, ‘redefining mobile’, that’s pretty much when Facebook announced they were going ‘mobile’ as a business. They completely changed their revenue model since then, to basically depend on that ‘first billion’. And now need to stop that billion users going somewhere else. But there’s little sign of what that might be. What chance have the rest of us got?
- In closing I thought I’d mention a couple of my favourite things from MWC. Remember the bike I mentioned earlier? And how it had a drone flying in front? The important thing is not the drone - the obvious “mobile” thing, even though it’s good fun. It’s a proper big engine bike running on batteries - and they’re about to drive it around the world without recharging. It takes a lot of batteries and a support car to do that, but it’s all about proving ’vehicles’ can be genuinely mobile too.
- And if you think back to Facebook’s map and wish to connect the globe, the blocker for that isn’t going to be connection, it’s going to be power. People in developing countries might be able to get free internet, but can’t get free electricity. Mobile definitely isn’t “mobile” if it needs cables.
- Finally - I loved the fact that Samsung had to create a museum of its own devices, to remind us that the new S7 was actually different from their previous phone. And the fact that our friend Zuckerberg turned up and took the all the publicity away.
- And despite all my cynicism I keep going back, because it’s all going somewhere - it’s part of my job to try and figure it out for Skyscanner. Hopefully having that cynical eye, whilst trying things out, will bring some things like ‘virtual travel’, that we thought would be years away, a bit closer.