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Submitted by Mike Grenville on Mon, 01 Mar 2004 17:36 |
The theme of 3GSM in Cannes this year was 'celebrating one billion connected people worldwide'. Read our impressions of what was hot and not.
However getting online proved to be more of a challenge this year with the increased numbers in the press room expanding out into the corridor. Technology was brought to earth by a virus that took out email access and made Internet connections erratic causing Blackberry users to sympathise smugly.
Jaw Dropping
 Biggest jaw dropping moment of the show was without doubt the Siemens fireworks display that just kept going and getting bigger and bigger. But the real gut wrenching stunner was their show budget that included the ship in the bay again for what was rumoured to be $15 million! This from a company said to not be doing that well and without a major product launch at the show.
It's Users That Matter
The show marked the passing of the one billion GSM connections worldwide and Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association (and an American), made pointed reference to the jibe made last year that GSM was an antiquated French technology. Flatly denying that it was antiquated, he agreed that it did work in France but also in French Guyana as well as China (with 177 million users) and in nearly 200 other countries around the world. "It’s a technology that shows a high level of co-operation as evidenced by roaming and interoperability" he said. But "the real triumph of GSM is the users" proclaimed Conway. "There are still 4 billion people in the world without any communications" he later reminded attendees at the awards ceremony.
Indeed the message to remember the users was a useful one to remember as you walked around looking at all the dazzling video and 3G services. It was after all users who discovered SMS and made it the cornerstone of mobile data services for operators that we see today. And when we say data services let’s not forget that for the most part we mean person to person SMS.
Speaking at a UK Trade & Investment networking event Mike Short, MDA Chairman and Head of Research and Development at O2 said that as we look towards creating 2 billion GSM users ,"rather than 3G it is the three Vs that will be important, namely Volume, Value and Variety."
Another call to remember the users came from Karen Walsh Senior Consultant with ARC Group who said that "improved usability was essential for the uptake of mobile services". With stands dominated by 3G and 3G like services, one could have come under the impression that SMS was a forgotten technology rather than accounting for 96% of messaging in 2003 according to Ovum.
"SMS is simple and has tremendous potential now and for many years to come" said Netsize Chairman Stanislais Chesnais. "What can we learn from SMS?" he asked, answering that the most important things were "quality and simplicity and not to get carried away with the next new technology".
SPAM
Although adult content is tipped as one of the main revenue drivers of advanced services, there were only a small handful of suppliers at the show.
There was much talk about SPAM at the show. There is a fine line for vendors selling technical solutions to SPAM between talking up the problem and engaging in sales education. As an illustration our 160 Characters straw poll in progress is indicating 21% have never had any mobile spam, while 30% had none in the last month. For the future 561% think the amount of spam will only grow a little and 22% think it will stay at the same level or get less. Click here to take survey Just as the Eskimos have many different words for snow, as an industry we need to be a lot clearer about what we mean when we use the word SPAM as only some of the sources of SPAM need technical solutions.
3GSM Awards
Tuesday evening saw the 3GSM Awards ceremony. Highlights of the awards for messaging were as follows :
Best Infrastructure/Network Solution Product was taken by Argogroup for its Monitor Master that allows the operator to test mobile services from the most important perspective - that of the user.
The Vodafone Mobile Connect Card won the Best Mobile Application or Service - Corporate Market that provides mobile internet to laptops.
The Consumer Market category was won by SMART Communications from The Philippines for its SMART Load that enables ‘over the air’ top up of pre-pay credit. Runners up were DUCONT FZ-LLC for School Connect (United Arab Emirates), mobilkom austria for m-parking (Austria) and Shazam Entertainment for the Shazam music identification service (UK).
02 and ‘Milly’s Fund’ for the Teach UR Mum 2 TXT personal safety campaign (UK) won Best Use of Mobile for Accessibility in the Mobile in the Community category (reported here and here here ) .
Full details of the can be viewed here .
Our Pick of The Show
From a messaging perspective, the most interesting products on display were ones that helped grow the use of messaging and services in various ways. There were four that look as though they should have some impact on data services take up.
It has always seemed strange that the menu structure of a phone should be fixed without possibility for upgrade. Making new services easy to find is a key to getting users to try new services. Surfkitchen is able to not only update the look and feel of the handset and and new icons to the menu, but also to push content to the handset such as ringtones that can be trialed and then purchased. Already live with O2 Surfkitchen will be announcing more operators who have taken their solution shortly.
While speakers at the Mobile and Interactive TV session called for operators to increase capacity to enable mainstream TV programmes to be able to use SMS fully, Avalanche Mobile has launched just such a solution to cope with surges in demand that TV can generate. Handling both MO and MT traffic, we can only hope that next year TV companies will be satisfied in their capacity demands.
www.avmob.com
Coming over the horizon is Instant Messaging on mobiles and a neat enhancement is offered by Followap. www.followap.com By ‘presence enabling’ your contacts in your address book, you can know in advance whether someone’s phone is switched on and whether they are able to take a call. This can save calling someone only to reach voice mail so you could choose to send and SMS, or finding they were online initiate an IM session.
As well as a p2p chat function, content can also be pushed to the handset.
Presence functionality is installed in an increasing number of handsets and Folowap say that Operators have been caught unawares and need to catch up and enable the function in their networks. Already part of Vodafone Live! And SFR in France, amongst others, once again the key to full take up is interconnect between operators.
While MMS growth takes off slowly, anything that helps make it more personal is to be welcomed. Such a service is French start-up RealEyes http://www.realeyes3d.com that allows camera phones users to send hand-written messages with text, drawings or pre-printed information, such as newspaper ads, portions of printed pages, etc. as if using their phone as a "connected scanner". Most importantly the service is fun and easy to use and could be one of those tools that increase MMS usage - assuming that prices of MMS come down to a realistic level.
Now the real work begins to for dlegates and exhibitors alike to follow up all those interesting meetings and fulfill all those promises!
Mike Grenville
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