The huge event showcased the latest devices, business models, carrier strategies, content, and of course technology. Those of us who had to stay at home could keep up with the news via the show daily. We also followed extensive news coverage of the new products and companies on display in Barcelona. Here are a few items that caught our eye:
- New Zealand's Mobile Data Now shares our conviction that sending some form of text-based message (SMS, email, IM) will be the preferred mobile communication format for the short-to-mid-term, until the mobile web browsing experience is improved and gains ubiquity. While mobile web browsing is growing quickly in the US, so far this type of service isn't a high priority with the majority of mobile users globally.
- Yahoo's oneConnect further validates our belief that social networking will prove to be one of the "killer apps" of mobile.
- Location-based-services, especially those powered by GPS, are a huge growth area with far-reaching consequences that businesses are just beginning to capitalize on.
- Google's comment that it's seeing an astonishing 50x more searches coming from iPhones than from other mobile devices reinforces the dominance of Apple's device. As we've said before, we couldn't ask for a better platform than the iPhone as the preferred device for iPling's initial product.
