MPA 2010
Apologies in advance that my wrap up of the event is not complete. A scheduling conflict unfortunately meant that I had to leave before the end of the formal agenda.
I’m sure that the official round up of the event and publication of all the winners will be live on the MPA website soon, plus you can look for Twitter activity from the event on it’s two hash tags that seemed to be in most frequent use: #mpa and #mpa10 . The venue had no cellular coverage again this year hint hint Rudy 
so only the lucky few on WiFi were tweeting from the room.
This wrap up is therefore in the bite sizes pieces that I would have tweeted if I was online at the time!
Russell Buckley from AdMob and Rich Wong from Accel Partners gave the keynotes. I came in too late to do justice to Russell’s presentation, but Rich gave some important perspective, sprinkled with a little nostalgia. You can grab Rich’s slides here.
Rich rightly pointed out that there has never been a more exciting time to be in the mobile space. Just 10 years ago there were no high speed mobile data networks, actually no real data networks of any note regardless of speed, and phones were only just coming out of the grey scale age with the first colour phones appearing in 2002. I then started a mini personal flashback to my days of launching MMS with O2 UK, and the awe that the arrive of the little Sony Ericsson T68 brought – colour screen, java, MMS, clip on camera – that little thing, quickly followed by the T68i, was a turning point for the industry.
Rich then spoke about Smartphone growth driving new services and presenting a platform for innovative startup’s to really florish, saying that he believed the ingredients were now all there for a new Google or eBay sized company to emerge. Of course he rightly pointed out that geography is hugely important, and in emerging markets the feature phone and Nokia still dominate.
Rich took the opportunity to play back the demise of the walled garden of the Mobile Operator portals, with mobile now following the trend we saw on fixed Internet – Google now being the number 1 mobile site for traffic.
He then moved on to an interesting Alien vs Predator analogy to describe the hardware and O/S war in mobile over the past 10 years.
Alien vs Predator #1: Nokia vs Microsoft
Alien vs Predator #2: Nokia vs Asia (ref Sharp’s Voda Live devices)
Alien vs Predator #3: Apple vs The Droids
I guess the interesting there is the future relevance of Nokia.
Finally Rich wrapped up with some pearls for start up’s (see his deck for the accurate playback), but the bullets were:
- Describe the problem statement clearly
- Team background and credibility
- Platform and distribution strategy
- Stay capital efficient
- Work with investors that have an in-depth understanding of your space
We then moved on the MPA award in Entertainment which was won by Layar – congratulations.
Next we moved onto the MPA in Innovation pitches.
Wikitude was in the augmented reality space, like Layar, overlaying information onto your phones camera image. There was a brief mention of Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) which is being reviewed by the W3C. They had also won the NavTeq Global LBS Challenge.
Spendino was from Mobile Monday Berlin and was focused on charitable donations via SMS, also providing the infrastructure and settlement for the charitable organisations in the back end.They said they had 100 organisations signed up.
Continuing the humanitarian theme, Lifesaversnetwork was focused on disaster planning and tracking – a kind of personal aid if you get caught up in a natural, or other disaster, situation with practical advice and LBS tracking etc.
Mobisiteglore was based on the insight that in emerging markets PC penetration is low, so this service allows people to build fully featured web and mobile sites directly from their phone. 50,000 sites have already been created.
Mobile Acuity from Mobile Monday Edinburgh was a product recognition app, with retailers uploading images and data for their product. They claimed 90%+ accuracy on standard products, and also good results when identifying houses.
TaxiPal was a complete mobile Taxi solution. Live booking which had a nice auction process where it seemed rival Taxi firms could make you offers to compete for your business. There was also integrated mapping to check your route wasn’t designed to ramp up your fare, and also more traditional local taxi firm listings if you just wanted a number.
Finally, before I had to run, was AudioBoo from Mobile Monday London. Small 5 minute voice recordings which can be stored and sharing across social media sites.
Apologies for the incompleteness of the write up, but hopefully this fragment is still useful for those that couldn’t make it to the event.
Check out Mobile Entertainment’s excellent daily round up, of news coming out of MWC, and of course the brand new MWC coverage and content aggregation service provided by O2 Litmus, here.
