How much margin must there be on mobile phone sales to support this kind of commercial growth? Spotted in Aberdeen, a Vodafone shop is being fitted out right next to an O2 outlet.
The Link is gone, and The Carphone Warehouse is loosing networks, so I guess the networks are making a last-gasp stand at owning the channel.
Before it become fully commoditized.
After a week and a bit of reflection, the only truely new and cool thing I saw at 3GSM was Qix from Zi.
This provides what is essentially multi-tap access to any name, function or application on your phone. Looking for your mother’s phone number? No need to wade through huge menus, just tap M-U-M and lo, there it is, perhaps along with mum.jpg. Neat, huh?
The Duke of York, a British Royal was being shown round British presence at 3GSM. Here’s me demoing our Community product to him. He was surprisingly knowledgeable.
Here’s an over view of the central road at 3GSM. The white buildings down the side are temporary suites and demo zones, including some large trucks and even a skateboard ramp.
The halls range off the the side in both directions. To the left were the big handset manufacturers, to the right the larger exhibitors, and further still off to the right are the halls with the smaller exhibitors like us.
The picture was taken on the last day (and it’s overexposed, sorry, had the camera set for taking pictures inside the halls) when the numbers of visitors had slowed down a lot. This just shows how manic the whole event has become.
I had been intending to post a stream of items from 3GSM, but instead we were talking to an almost constant stream of people with strong interest in mobile advertising and our Ad360 products. This is good for us, but not very interesting for blog readers.
I’ll be posting some more comments over the next couple of weeks, but there wasn’t an awful lot of anything dramatically new, or not that I saw anyway. Clearly mobile advertising has become a hot topic, whereas last year it was met with blank looks last year. There was no so-called adult content section this year, not an indication that it’s not selling but one that it is going under the counter into specialist events of some of the private hospitality suites.
Handsets looks more colourful, and many people are bandying the term “iphone killer” around with cheerful abandon.
3GSM is now more or less any wireless technology, with WiMAX, WiFi and other formats just as prevelant.
However the show has become almost unmanageably busy. Many people were suggesting that it would be better to be split into smaller events, or at least have the stands organised in some logical manner. The small people’s hall - Hall 2 - is a bit like a car boot sale for technology. One stand will have a mobile base station parked in it, next door to one offering obscure SMS routing optimization software. No logic at all.
Why can’t we get mobile networks that serve our rail links in the UK? I was in Glasgow for a while today, and took the short train journey over. Calls drop out for no apparent reason, tunnels don’t have repeaters, and hundreds of frustrated customers bemoan the inadequate service.
The rail link from London City to Stansted Airport is the same. Random drops and poor signal for no apparent reason all the way to the airport. Not impressive.
I love these spoofs of the Apple adverts:
(Extracted from the comments on the Guardian article below.)
Ok, I just had to post the link to this “I hate Macs” column from the Guardian.
Sorry Robin and Sam!
Doubly amusing because of the Mac ads surrounding the article when I viewed it. And for the record this was posted from my MacBook which I’ve had to restart several times today. Once for a security update and several times to unhand the WiFi drivers.
This is the Paris Vertu shop, right there in amongst Cartier, Bvlgari and other hideous designers. A phone in window was priced at €15,500.
