BARCELONA, Spain ? And so yet another Mobile World Congress ends, with lots of talk about Google, Microsoft, applications, Apple and the future of mobile.

There was plenty of debate the sheer number of app stores and how applications will fare versus the mobile Web. Throw in discussions around augmented reality and this Barcelona show was quite an optimistic wrap for mobile executives attending from around the world.

Many thanks to our correspondents for their hard work and sharp eyes, ears and insights. Here are their final reports:

Day 4

Inside the mobile tornado: 20,000 visitors to App Planet in Barcelona, 6,000 developers flock to Mobile World Congress

Harald Neidhardt
Chief marketing officer and cofounder
Smaato
Hamburg, Germany

BARCELONA, Spain ? The Mobile World Congress 2010 closed its doors with a big fanfare about mobile applications and a total of 49,000 visitors from 200-plus countries. An upbeat industry gathering, sunshine in the end ? and from where I sit, we are right in the middle of the high-tech tornado of a hyper growth mobile market.

The last day of the show found strong competition in a sunny and warm spring day, and some show visitors might have preferred the sun?s glare over the brightest AMOLED display in Samsung?s Wave, exposed in Hall 8. Not only competing with the spring light, the Samsung Wave and the new Windows phone, Motorola Blur and others should not be underestimated as major game-changers in mobile advertising.

You need no app for that ? oops, where can I place my banner?
One major challenge comes from the industry?s stronger focus on user experience, which leads to a decline in the usage of applications for everything.

Personal status updates, pictures and messaging from various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and MSN are converging into so-called social hubs where all of these updates are being placed around the user?s contacts, instead of being scattered across several applications.

This decreases the potential number of moments where the user has contacts with applications, and thus the occasions for mobile ads to be displayed.

Mobile advertisers should be reflective over the new Samsung Wave, Windows Phone 7, Motoblur and newer mobile social hubs, which offer push updates and discard the necessity to open up any ?app for that.?

Another challenge emerges from the technical progress of displays.

Samsung?s Wave?s AMOLED is really bright, sharp and appealing. The average graphical banner might look blurry on this bright display. The iPad, however, opens up a new format category for ad graphics.

That said, your average mobile screen is fragmented into a growing number of specifications and will require increasingly different formats of ads.

On the other hand, new uses of the mobile phone, such as NFC coding for keys and mobile payment, will increase the number of touchpoints and hence the opportunities to advertise on mobile channels.

Mobile advertisers will have to think of new ways to reach the users, as services become more direct and more personal. The bottom line is: ads will only get through to the user if they are able to add the right value at the right time.

A challenge that is being addressed by the upcoming Mobile Marketing Association standards committee on rich media is the need to show more examples on how mobile advertising really uses all features of a mobile device: personal, location-based, always-on, rich media, large screen formats and touch-screen interfaces.

So we have to look at the complete branded post-click user experience ? the display banner is a start.

Yes, we as an industry have talked about this for years and there are more great examples. But a wave of services such as augmented reality or branded phones call for the industry to look deeper in the whole user experience.

As British mobile media maven and business strategist Jonathan MacDonald, CEO of JME, told me during the show, ?We have to consider the user of a mobile device much more a fellow citizen whom we want to involve in a brand experience and consider her/his preferences, permission and privacy choices in order to cut through the clutter.?

This is just the beginning and the mobile advertising industry is in for an exciting year 2010!

Hasta Lluego!

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Apps store mania in Barcelona

Michael Neidhoefer
CEO
Netbiscuits
Kaiserslautern, Germany

Do you know how many app stores there are in the market? More than 50!

After the Mobile World Congress we can easily add another dozen, headed by the so-called Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) that brings 28 players from the industry ? 25 MNOs and 3 OEMs ? together.

Spectator applications really seem to be the hallelujah of the mobile economy today. Why? Two reasons:

a) App stores shall ?provide a single gateway for developers to access a vast potential customer base? so that ?developers will only have to create one version of their application and this can be used on multiple types of devices and operating systems? (WAC).

b) App stores shall enable MNOs and OEMs to secure their share of the revenue created by digital content and services provided via mobile phones.

That is all right with me, but in reality the opposite will come true.

I talked to several OEMs and MNOs in Barcelona. No one of them, even though they were engaged with WAC, showed intentions to stop their individual app store initiatives.

The result will be a confusing number of new platforms ? app stores ? that will add to the general fragmentation and turn the developer?s hair gray even faster.

So we are very positive with regards to the race between mobile application and the mobile Web.

The overwhelming number of requests for solutions and partnership that we received at this year?s Mobile World Congress showed us that the mobile browser is much more in focus as the platform of the future than the current buzz around applications and app stores suggests.

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Femtocells will add new dimension to mobile marketing, Google pursuing 5G world

Val Christopherson
Managing director
Global Results Communications
Irvine, CA

As Mobile World Congress wound down, a couple of interesting developments cropped up yesterday.

First, AT&T leaked/announced a second-quarter launch of femtocells in the United States, although the folks there were coy about specific timelines.

You may remember femtocells as mini base stations that fit in your home or business and enable service providers to extend service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable.

While AT&T sorts out the network provisioning and consumer pricing for femtocells, mobile marketers should be sharpening their proverbial knives. 

Besides offering more ubiquitous coverage that will drive more eyeballs toward mobile in general, femtocells will open a wide array of home-based mobile marketing opportunities, such as ?connected home? applications ? mlearning, mbanking, msurveying and mpersonal management.

Indeed, much like cinema advertising with a captive audience prior to the start of a movie, people at home tend to be more settled and attentive. Well, once they get the kids to bed, they tend to be ?

Imagine sitting down to watch ?Lost? or ?Idol? and being able to pay your bills from your mobile device. You can do that now, but with femtocells it will be far faster and a far better consumer experience that will reduce barriers to adoption.

The other development is the continued thrust of Google toward mobile world domination. We saw this at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but Android is gaining even more momentum with handset partner announcements from Alcatel, Dell, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and ZTE.

During his keynote Tuesday, Feb. 16, Google CEO Eric Schmidt declared that the company was going ?Mobile First,? meaning that it would design its applications ? as a first priority ? for mobile use versus PCs. 

Using a mobile device, Mr. Schmidt demonstrated voice-activated searches, a picture-activated search engine, foreign-language translation capabilities to open cross-cultural communications, and even on-the-spot diagnosis applications for mobile health.

Let us be clear ? this is not 4G thinking from Google. This is 5G and 6G stuff.  These are mobile capabilities that will be commonplace in the next decade and beyond.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs may have beaten out Mr. Schmidt for the Mobile Personality of the Year at Tuesday?s 2010 Global Mobile Awards, but at the rate things are going, the Google CEO may have the last laugh.

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Day 3

Christian Lindholm
Managing partner
Fjord
London

Mobile World Congress got augmented as it hosted the Augmented Reality Summit.

Key stakeholders in the field, including Nokia, Google and Layar, got together to discuss the future of augmented reality, and where it fits within the mobile ecosystem. You get to see everyone at really close quarters.

For design studios such as ours, it was a chance to check out what the competition was up to. Of course, there was lots of insider gossip, too!

One of the key takeaways from the event was just how passionate everyone is about creating truly connected, seamless digital lives.

We at Fjord are fond of talking about technology becoming an extension of the self ? the great thing about Mobile World Congress is seeing how many other people share this vision.

I want to speak a little about a talk that a colleague of mine, Nancy Birkhoelzer, gave about the future of augmented reality and user experience. Nancy is the Managing Director of Fjord GmbH in Berlin, has a bubbling passion for augmenting reality. Nancy, as always, was interesting and engaging, and I wanted to share some of our key findings of the paper with you.

Nancy's main argument was that the concepts of consistency, content discovery and short usage occasions are really the most important things that we need to consider when we are talking about the development and widespread usage of augmented reality solutions.

What I really liked about Nancy's paper was that while a lot of people talk about open standards and open platforms, Nancy's talk really broke down why it is important, and gave a design/user experience slant on it. This is something which is often missed.

Nancy is passionate about content providers giving users an integrated, seamless, and consistent user experience wherever they go. This has been picked up by developers such as Mobilizy. Mobilizy is working hard to provide a standardized experience, and others need to join them in their quest. 

Everyone can talk about integrated, seamless and consistent user experience, though what is important is the specifics of how that is achieved.

Nancy argued cogently that this kind of experience just needs access to be granted to the augmented reality functionality from any application on the phone.

The iPhone can be a frustrating open/close experience in terms of applications, and this is only going to be more annoying. Nancy's clear message was ? authorize once ? not in twenty different applications.

Nancy also pointed out, quite rightly, that it is no good if there is not one consistent augmented reality view out there. She pointed out that the need for all augmented reality experiences to essentially look and feel the same is often overlooked.

If these interfaces are not consistent, users are going to have to spend a lot of time figuring it out. Aligned with this is the need to see augmented reality not as a new service in itself, but as an additional view of a located object, such as a list, a map or a grid.

What is really great about an event like Mobile World Congress is that you can see some of this stuff being put into effect, and see the people who are involved in deeply integrating the operating system into the handset.

In all the fuss about Samsung Wave in the past few days, it is easy to ignore the equally compelling partnership which has been struck between Layar and Samsung.

I was lucky enough to have a quick chat with Maarten Lens-FitzGerald of Layar at the summit, and he was really excited about the potential of moving augmented reality to the center of the device. He wants to bring it so close to the center of the device that augmented reality is considered a normal service of the device.

One of the points which Nancy was really keen to press home was that augmented reality manufacturers need to think in terms of content discovery instead of search.

Of course we have Google Goggles, but Google Goggles is not going to replace anyone's regular search engine any time soon. It is, however, a great way of intuitively finding information about the world around you.

Technologies such as Google Goggles are also a great way to open up emerging markets. They can have this real democratizing power, and get rid of the hassle of map reading in areas where maps are poor. They are great for stepping in and adding a little layer of content on top to guide existing use cases. It is certainly not a tool for using for its own sake.

One thing that came out of the whole discussion was a sense that everyone is trying to work out how to monetize augmented reality technologies, and make users willing to pay for it.

Perhaps when we have moved towards a more standardized future for augmented reality ? with companies, handsets, content providers singing from the same hymn sheet ? people will be more willing to pay.

I do sense with augmented reality, though, that we have not yet reached the peak of its excitement curve. I think we will see a growth in augmented reality over the coming year, and that the interest in augmented reality during Mobile World Congress 2011 will be nothing short of frenetic.

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Here are some pictures from the event (thank you, Smaato's Vesna Gudlin and Harald Neidhardt):

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