Mobile Fix: MWC – it’s that time of the year again

Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, predicts what will be big news at this week’s Mobile World Congress…

Mobile World Congress

With the annual Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona this week there is lots of anticipation about who is going to announce what.

The big news last week was a leaked memo from Stephen Elop (the new-ish CEO of Nokia) in which he talks of Nokia being on a burning platform and they have to make some radical moves. The general view is that this means them adopting another operating system – either as an addition to or a replacement for Symbian and Meego.

You might remember we reported the rumours they would switch to Android, but the smart money now seems to be on a partnership with Microsoft (where Elop used to work), using the well received Windows Phone 7 operating system.

This would be big news as it would revitalise Nokia – who still sell millions of phones everyday, but because they’re not doing too well with smartphones they are being marginalised by analysts and the City.

It would also be big news as it gets Microsoft back at the mobile table – they are desperate to take on the big boys of mobile and this could be their last chance. (Update – Friday morning’s news confirmed our speculation)

In the week when we learnt that smartphones outsold PCs for the first time ever, all the computer people are really keen to migrate into mobile.

Since HP bought Palm last year, they’ve been developing new products and they have now announced a really nice looking tablet as well as two smartphones. Using the very good Palm operating system WebOS they seem to have a good chance to bring their undoubted expertise and organisation into mobile.

To some Yahoo! now seem outsiders in mobile. CEO Carol Bartz is speaking at MWC where she was expected to announce Deadeye – a mobile project that allows people to get personalised content on their smartphone. But they just announced it in California – it is called Livestand and the first version is for tablets.

People tend to forget that Yahoo! pioneered personalised content on the web with MyYahoo, and they made a lot of early moves in mobile, so they should be well positioned to do something interesting – and Livestand does look cool. But the industry wants to see a cohesive mobile strategy from Yahoo. Hopefully that is what Carol Bartz will talk through next week.

We also expect a lot of buzz around the Facebook phone from INQ – which we told you about months ago. Essentially it’s a deep integration of Facebook into a budget priced phone from Hutchison Whampoa owned INQ. With INQ’s history of making social focused handsets aimed at the youth market, and with Hutchison also an investor in Facebook, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

But with lots of new device manufacturers emerging we wonder if we won’t see a move towards the Japanese model, where there is a huge range of handsets and you buy the one that best suits your particular needs; a twitter phone or one with a great camera (and all the picture apps pre installed), or one with Spotify or SoundCloud baked in for music lovers?

The other story that will run and run is whether Twitter is really for sale. And how true are these stories of a $10 billion valuation – when revenues have to double in 2011 to get to around $100m?

Those who believe we’re in a tech bubble will cite this as more proof  – but if you are Facebook or Google with billions in the bank, you have to take this seriously. Adding Twitter to Google would give them a great social platform, plus enable them to really exploit real time search. Adding Twitter to Facebook is probably less compelling but certainly the two services are complimentary.

And when you are doing the math, you have to factor in the value of the other guy NOT getting it, too.

Finally…

Google live streamed an interesting Think Mobile event on Thursday night. I’m guessing the video will be available and is worth watching – especially as there is a presentation from Mary Meeker in there, with lots of new data.

Jason Spero – Head of Mobile ads for Google – makes a strong case for the need to be there when people are looking for you – reminding us that around 15% of Google searches in the US are now mobile – and most end at a website that doesn’t work on mobile. All our learnings suggest its pretty similar over here too.

So, as you’d expect, we totally agree. And next week we’ll have some big news of our own on how we can help brands get this sorted. Watch this space.

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