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On May 29-30 you can join me in Girona for a LAB on MEDIA and Human Experience, organised by the Club of Amsterdam. I will join this “immersed experience of a Do-Tank” together with Laurence Desarzens, urban communicator at beatmap.com, Paul F.M.J. Verschure, ICREA research professor at the Technology Department of the University Pompeu Fabra and Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director, Yahoo! Research and moderated by Humberto Schwab, Director, Club of Amsterdam, Innovation Philosopher.

All related info to participate to this LAB can be found here at the website of Club of Amsterdam. On their blog, you can read a short interview with me related to the LAB event in Girona.

There are only a few places left to attend this LAB on MEDIA and Human Experience. mTrends readers who would like to attend can get a discount discount [Euro 980 - instead of Euro 1.300]. You can download the mTrends registration form here or you can use your mTrends discount code 02CT92 using the Online Media LAB Registration Form.

I wanted to give you a short debrief on the excellent MobileMonday Barcelona sesssion we had on Mobile Gaming and Beyond. Despite Semana Santa (a lot of locals out of town) and the pouring rain, we had the auditorium nearly filled with mobile enthusiasts not wanting to miss a word from this months’ interesting line-up of speakers.

Nicolas Nova kicked-off straight with his presentation, titled “Sinking one’s teeth into new metaphors for mobile gaming” and was basically a critique of the current state of mobile gaming. Instead of describing 3D on cell phones, location-based gaming or augmented reality, he encourages mobile game designers to consider 3 other avenues to explore, such as the use of motion/mobility instead of immobile situations (see image).

David Camps from Intermón Oxfam presented a mobile game, called Refugee. The videogame has the objective of raising awareness on the lack of security and adequate aid suffered by millions of people trapped in forgotten crises such as Darfur. In it, Assia flees from the drought in her country and she must face up to violence and the lack of water and food. These are skill challenges, as in other games, but inspired from the real life of more than eight million refugees and close to 25 million displaced persons all over the world, of which 80 percent are women and children. The game ends giving you the opportunity to request more attention from the Spanish government to these crises. The funds raised with the downloads of the videogame – which costs 2.40 Euros – will go to humanitarian aid programs of Intermon Oxfam in the southeast of Sudan, concretely to the refugee camps of Djabal and Goz Amer.

Ignacio Cavero gave us a chronological overview of LemonQuest and its sucessful portfolio including the Ronaldinho Gaucho Street Soccer game. LemonQuest recently announced the acquisition of the Chinese company i4Game, an innovative developer of mobile games and is looking at other emerging mobile markets such as India.

Marta Vieira from the Portugese YDreams explained us about their experience and do’s and don’t of LocationBased-Gaming. Check out their stuff, it’s really cool!

The audience q&a participation was weaker then the MyMobileTV session we had last month, some issues like interoperability of games on other portable devices and the coming of web advergaming players into the mobile market space remained unanswered, as for now.

You can download most presentations of the Mobile Gaming and other sessions at the MobileMonday Barcelona website, you just need to register to the community and logon to the documents section to download the presentations.

Next months’ topic is on Mobile Search and promises another great sessions with confirmed speakers from JumpTap, Taptu, Yahoo! Mobile and Nokia Mobile Search.

The next MobileMonday Barcelona event on Monday, April 2, focuses on the current state of the mobile gaming industry.

Speakers include Nicolas Nova (Switzerland) - researcher at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), Maarten Noyons (France) - Managing Director, International Mobile Gaming Awards, Ignacio Cavero (Spain) - President and CEO, LemonQuest and a speaker from YDreams, Spain/Portugal.

(introduction below by Fabien Girardin from the Interactive Technologies Group, UPF University)

Currently, the mobile game market is highly dominated by games that have an easy gameplay, few simple rules and do not require special skills to enjoy. These games are mostly clones of successful casual games such as Minesweeper or Tetris.

However, the future of mobile gaming seems to rely on new types of gameplays that embed the new capabilities of mobile phones to sense their context. Like the newly released and successful Wiimote, mobile devices become sensitive to movements (e.g. Nokia N5500), engaging players to physically move as part of the gameplay. In addition, the emergence near-field communication (RFID, Bluetooth, QR codes) and location-aware technologies enable new types of scenarios that link virtual worlds with the players’ physical surroundings. For example, multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments.

The increasing contextual and proximity awareness of mobile devices provide new opportunities for players to engage in collaborative or competitive game settings. In contrast to this pretty picture, many issues such as the operators walled gardens, the size of the screens, network quality and coverage as well as the processing power of the mobile phone challenge the development and deployment of these new types of games. Finally, the Economic future: who is going to pick up the fragmentation and the distribution challenge? Where is the 8 bn mobile gaming market?

As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava while sharing experiences about life and work. Attendance is free; all you need to do is register and/or confirm your presence for this event at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe/ to reserve one of the 150 seats available.

More details at MobileMonday Barcelona website.

This is Sophia Berglund. Right now she is 25months old and growing so fast in her capabilities in communication - already she can muster small sentences in English, Korean, Japanese and some German! She can even translate! Sophia can create lines, shapes and forms by way of painting her communication…

But what makes me the most excited is seeing her grab technology with an incredible desire to learn and experience - she explores, she examines, pushes, prods, de-constructs the technology in some cases (i.e. she breaks my expensive “toys”)

Part of her 1st and 2nd years were spent in S.Korea where she was born into one of the most advanced mobile “handphone” cultures in the world - literally 5minutes after birth her first ever picture (and video) taken by a mobile/handphone and sent to our friends and relatives, she made her first mobile location based phone call at 5months and at 6months she was surfing mobile internet and watching mobileTV! She had her first “co-location” experience in 2006 when friends “broadcast” the 비 / Bi (Rain)**concert live over their handphone to my handphone - Seoul - to - Jeju…

Sophia is growing up into a digital world. Already she has a real-demo phone given to her by a friend at LGe - which she mimmicks her immediate social circle in making calls and surfing data.

Wow! Yes but today we question what is next - we talk of ubiquotous computing, mobile internet, mobile2.0, mobileTV, mobileGaming, mobileAdvertising, mobileMarketing, Location Based Services, Bluetooth, Proximity Marketing, smartphones, convergence, m-YouTube, moblogs, iMode, 3G, 3.5G, CDMA, FOMA, RFID, Flash-Lite, SVGt, mobile-Image recognition, mobileCameras, mobileVideo, Vlogs, iPhone (iPhone aka LG Prada), mobile UI, touch-screens, thumb-tribes, handy, handphone, keitai - blah blah blah and all of this jargon and often mind boggling marketing “psycho-babble” has made me think - where is it all going - how much “smarter” will the next generation of “phones” like my SonyEricsson P990i become - how much more can we cram into one single device!?

How many more times can my P990i crash - a victim of its own “smartness” - Yet I put up with it as when my P990 is alert and working it blows my mind with all of its functions and how they are symbiotic* to my daily needs - I can Wi-Fi (well not in Germany they lock their Wi-Fi connections), Google movie reviews before entering the cinema, take videos and pictures and Flickr them, I can use Googlemaps when lost or curious, watch movies, RSS Feed news and blogs, email, VoIP, Messenger, listen to music, video call whilst on business trips, bemuse my wife, and entertain my colleagues like I am a mobile guru! Seriously though what is next?

So - I think “convergence” will continue as a trend for maybe the next 2-3 years - not only in hardware but in software and services that we can ever expand the phones capabilities - with it computing power, battery power and size! Multi-media will play a big role - motion graphics - advanced touch-screens (iPhone aka LG Prada)
smart phones that know what you use and like and build a UI around your user preferences - broader personalisation with iTunes music and video, enhanced imaging and editing functions, more Bluetooth functions in urban locations, free ubiquitous Wi-Fi - oh I could go on with a list of endless options I could do with…

Sophia in 28years time will be 30 and the date will be 2035 - what do you the mocom (mobile community) think will be next and what will “mobile” have become - we all see attempts at mobile technology in clothing, e-paper (with Wi-Fi connectivity), cyborg like integration of receivers/chips into our bodies, organic and nano-technology - but really I would love to hear your thoughts!

* BTW thanks to Bear in the Big Blue House
on Disney Playhouse for re-introducing me to this brilliant word “symbiotic” Children’s TV is great!

**비 / BMW Meets Truth**
and www.bmwmeetstruth.com

I would like to introduce you to Andrew Berglund, another regular guest blogger next to Yasmine Abbas and Martin Sauter who joined me here a couple of weeks ago. More great contributors will be joining M-Trends soon, if you would like to become one of them, drop me a line. If you have any ideas, comments and feedback on the contributions made or presented here, let me know; we’re covering different opinions on various topics in a ubiquitous mobility era, written from different locations, by people who are always on the move… If there are any subjects you would like to have covered here, feel free to suggest.

Andrew will cover the “creative” side of mobile society and the culture that surrounds it. In his contributions he will report on new trends that IHO push boundaries within the digital realm. Check his profile at his very - as he calls it - “un-web2.0 and un-mobile friendly” website. Just recently he left Interone as the Executive Creative Director - Worldwide working mainly on BMW (Global - EU, Asia, North America markets) and Unilever (Europe) digital media communications. As of April 1st he will have moved to Framfab and LBi as Head of Strategy & Innovation - an exciting remit to push boundaries of newer / emerging interactive medias such as mobile and social networks. Andrew has extensive experience in mobile development, concept, and creative communication strategies within the European and Asia markets - with the majority of his mobile work in S.Korea and Japan for clients such as NTT DoCoMo, MTV, Samsung, and LG (Cyon)

I know Andrew for a couple of years now and admire his work, his original views and valuable opinion, needless to say I am looking forward to his contributions!

This morning my last order arrived from Amazon.com. I am all excited since the package includes some of the books I’m really looking forward to read this spring like Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield, Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins and Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen.

Wonderful coincidence when Fabien pinged me yesterday evening if I was in for a drink with Adam who was on a brief urban transit in Barcelona, inbetween a flight from Sevilla, where he assisted Microsoft’s HCI 2020 conference, and a flight back to NYC. We went for a drink in Pipa Club, once the social gathering place for tobacco fans, now the mood setting for urban creatives, loungers, movers and groovers and people like us.

We talked about Agharta and Pangaea, some of the finest recordings from the least-understood period of Miles Davis’s career, Richard Horowitz who worked with Brian Eno - coinciding with a installation I went to see this week of 77 Million Paintings, about Paul Bowles and Jean Genet in Tangier, about Douglas Rushkoff and Psychic TV, and the link to Throbbing Gristle (hadn’t heard that one in a while!), about our network of people we happen to know both, including Kelly Goto, Yasmine Abbas and Nicolas Nova - the latter will be present at the next MobileMonday Barcelona on Mobile Gaming and Beyond.

In short, too much to discuss in such a short time, so we promised to continue the discussion somewhere soon. Maybe XTech 2007: “The Ubiquitous Web” on 15-18 May 2007 in Paris, France might be another occasion… Yasmine? Meanwhile I’ll start reading Adam’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, for sure, I’ll cover more of the book and its topics here soon.

Spanish national newspaper El Periódico reports it’s starting a new campaign using Mobile Image Recognition technology developed by Catalan startup Daem Interactive.

A picture taken with a camera phone of a photo appearing in the newspaper will allow the user to access exclusive mobile contents including advertising using MMS. The new system, called “Cázalo” will be launched in tomorrow’s newspaper, promoted by Telefónica and McCann interactive agency.

The inaugural advertising campaign has an announcement related to FC Barcelona - Real Madrid match of tomorrow from the Professional Liga of Futbol (LFP), the user will, besides entering in a contest, receive a promotional video from the Spanish Footbal League. The cost of the MMS message will be 0.60 euros message.

Relative: read Kelly Goto’s excellent interview with Ignacio Mondine on gotomobile.com and watch the latest demo of Daem’s atomtag 3G software that recognizes my picture and leads you to m-trends.org mobile, now how cool is that!

I got this one pinged by friend Andrew Berglund, at first sight maybe a bit off-topic from mobile but then again, the iPhone has already some of the multi-touch screen technology integrated… Anyway, this is definately some of the best I have seen lately in technology innovation so I want to share this with you.

Check this YouTube demo below from Perceptive Pixel, the company was founded by Jeff Han in 2006 as a spinoff of the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to develop and market the most advanced multi-touch system in the world.

More YouTube demo’s from Jeff Han here.

The 3GSM World Congress gives you a good overview of where the actual market is today - still a lot like last year - it looked at first sight…
My first thought to start this years’ 3GSM wrapup was to check what I wrote last year: “It took me a couple of days to be able to digest the whole event with it’s many cocktails and parties surrounding. The best part for me were the many wonderfull people I met behind the companies, projects and blogs.” I couldn’t find any better paragraph to resume’s this year event. Check the image (left) I took from the same spot as last year and notice that the telecom world is still a Man’s Man’s Man’s World. I invite you to find the women on the image… This incited me to continue my “Women in Mobile” interviews

Does this mean it was boring? Not really…too many interesting people around to talk to and change opinion with… No big news coming from the exhibition either: no real differences with last years’ show apart from more people, 60.000 (!) and an extra Mobile Content pavillon, but one could tell from small things that changes are (finally?) to come. Let’s have a closer look at all things mobile.

DEVICES
On the handset side, no real innovations as last years’ Nokia Nseries, but a lot of improvements by many manufacturers and cool handsets I got the chance to play with.

Nokia N95 and the new Nokia Communicator E90 lanched at 3GSM, N95 is a real cool phone, I’m looking forward to the mobile apps that are going to play with the GPS functionality, the E90 Communicator is a really cool phone with many apps but honestly a bit too heavy for me. The LG Shine phone (check also the LG Prada phone) was surprisingly solid and extremely good in usability design, and the touchscreen… a big improvement with the Chocolate. I played around with the MOTORIZR Z8, it’s the first time since longtime I got a good feeling about a Motorola I would like to mention also the coming Samsung’s F700 Ultra Smart Phone, with touchscreen, slide-out qwerty keyboard and 5-megapixel camera(!) My favorite design phone goes to Sony-Ericcson with the W880i Walkman Phone (metallic edition), real cool as you can see on the picture here, cool design and easy usability.

Note that Blackberry is still very popular amongst business people in the telecom industry, not one conversation without having someone look at his BB or do something urgent with it. What about the real BB, guys?

Some interesting movement could definately be ’seen’ in the mobile image recognition space.

MOBILE IMAGE RECOGNITION

Image recognition should not be confused with barcode scanning and QR-code technology though they are somewhere historically related of course, I wrote some of my views on this before here. Image recognition technology goes one step further in the sense that it doesn’t need a seperate application to be downloaded, or a decoder to decode, or a seperate ‘recognizable’ product code to be printed, and works - at its best - on most camera phones.

Some examples I saw during 3GSM were Global Peer Award jury winner Realeyes 3D (France) and finalists UpCode (Finland) and Tagit (Singapore), showing at the same time that real innovation can come from any corner of the world.

Since Google bought Neven Vision last summer and the attention visual search provider Riya got last year, the time seems right to bring image recognition commercially to mobile phones. One of the most interesting demo’s I saw during the exhibition was at the stand of Alcatel-Lucent: opening a video call, pointing your camera to a magazine ad connected your phone to your TV set over a 3G connection to be able to discover or store additional services to be viewed at home, dig?

Image recognition technology has some obvious advantages additionally to 2D-Barcodes like QR Codes or Datamatrix:

• They are graphically richer and more appealing, they can contain any logo or personalised image. Adding one to your blog, publication or advertisement might be less esthetically obtrusive than chaotic black and white codes, makes them ideally for next-generation mobile marketing campaigns.
• Unlike 2Dcodes, individual tags are easy to remember because they are images, not secretive machine only readable bar-codes.
• The Augmented Reality interaction paradigm makes it easier and more appealing for the user, your phone becomes like a sort of “magic lens”.
• Contextual menus can pop out of the tags: look up in wikipedia, listen to contents recoded, add contents to that tag…..it´s object hyperlinking or the mobile read-write web!

Daem Interactive had another interesting demo running with some logo’s and my face (!), pointing a cameraphone to it over a 3G connection connected the user immediately to m-trends.org mobile, very cool!

Ignacio from DAEM showed me this demo the first time in July last year, some might have seen the demo before at Under The Radar or MobileMonday Paris, now Ignacio gave me finally a go to blog this ‘atom3g’ demo of their patented application. Check it out, some of the coolest stuff around!

MOBILE MUSIC

On the Mobile Music front 3GSM started already one week before the actual event with Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music meaning Digital Rights Management (DRM); DRM is a trigger for the Record Labels to control the sales of digital music. A great and surprising Open Letter by Steve, certainly with a strategy behind, I was thinking a week before the event, too busy preparing the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards (I want to come back on the Steve Jobs letter later here).

Surprise, surprise, on Day one of the event, Microsoft anounced the launch of its own Mobile DRM system ‘PlayReady‘ (!) that will allow the use of commercial content on multiple different devices for a single fee. Is this what the consumer is waiting for?

Two days later, at the opening session on Wednesday, the chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group Corp, Edgar Bronfman Jr. said “that buying digital music from a mobile phone is too difficult and the music and mobile phone industries need to improve the process to meet demand (…)”

A study last year found that only 8.5 percent of people who own a phone that can be used to download and purchase music actually did so. “Why? It’s expensive, it’s complicated and it’s slow,” he said. “It’s amazing that we’ve generated as much revenue as we have given how cumbersome the experience can be.”

For your info, personally I haven’t bought one single tune on my mobile phone(s), though I consider myself one of the 3% online (legal) PC music buyers Steve is mentioning in his open letter:

“Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.”

The 3% I bought on iTunes of course, so where do the other songs come from? Older Cd’s (of LP’s I bought already once before…) copied to my iTunes and to my phone.

I wonder if the US companies heard about OMA DRM from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)? Its mission is to provide interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals. Since its inception in June 2002, the Open Mobile Alliance has grown to more than 300 companies representing mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies, and content providers Members include traditional wireless industry players such as equipment and mobile systems manufacturers (Ericsson, Siemens, Nokia, Openwave, Sony Ericsson, Philips, Motorola,Samsung…) and mobile operators (Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile…), but also software vendors (Microsoft - hello?, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Symbian, Celltick…)

I don’t get it everyone was thinking Apple would show it’s iPhone at 3GSM. Why smart Steve would do such thing now when he announced previously the iPhone launch for Europe around Christmas 2007? Who else can say he has a product with 50,400,000 Google entries before it’s actual launch I haven’t seen any other phone brand model beat that! Oviously no big players are scared about the iPhone…

One thing gets clearer everyday, the iPhone has one big advantage: it’s Mac OS X and iTunes seamless integration; why would the iPhone need 3G? Everyone will buy its tunes on iTunes and beam or synchronize them to his iPhone, easily, with one-click buy activated… I dig.

Still, when I wanted to make a personalized mix for the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards networking party (no selling or re-distributing of the music I bought!) iTunes told me “You cannot copy 16 of the choosen songs to your CD”… come one guys, GET REAL! Next time I think I’m going to invite a band and offer their songs directly through a Futurlink-a-like interface…

THE MOBILISATION OF THE WEB

One of the things I realized during the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation is happening everywhere and a lot of start-up companies are working in the mobile web area; while still in its very early stage, the mobilisation of the web is happening and it’s happening everywhere!

Google vice-president and chief Internet evangelist Vinton G. Cerf - also one of the founding fathers of the Internet, predicted Tuesday that mobile phones, not personal computers, will fuel growth of the worldwide Web, as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly.

There is definitely something to say about the title here and it was an important part of the discussions during 3GSM. Mike and Carlo mentioned something on this already, read also Michael’s interesting take on this subject.

The content hall (Hall 7) of the exhibition was filled with a lot of mobile adult (Sign ‘O’ the Times?) and web companies resolutely going mobile including Yahoo! Shozu won the 2nd time in a row the prize for Most Innovative Mobile Application or Content Award with its Mobile MultiMedia Delivery Platform. To me Shozu is one of the truly real great mobile integrated applications, but isn’t this a sign that no other great innovative applications are around, or haven’t been noticed by the organizers, or maybe have not been found worthy or mature to market yet?

This 3GSM is definately too early for the many mobile 2.0 (web) companies, many of them need to work harder on their business models; one may try to go around the operators but I think the next couple of years start-ups need to combine their innovative ideas and technology to work with the network operators to deploy compelling new services, supposing these become available for the masses with affordable fees of course. In any case, this show didn’t had any grouped sign of mobile 2.0 companies yet, hopefully we can expect some changes next year.

The above gets an intriguing touch however knowing that operators seem to realise that the top down content models are not working - people need content to consume and to play with. Vodafone seems to have understood this - ahead of its competitors, and announced some remarkable breakthrough deals. With European markets fully saturated with mobile telephones, Vodafone sees India as a key area for potential growth - see Vodafone’s $11.1 billion acquisition of controlling interest in India’s Hutchinson Essar, on the services side Vodafone concluded deals with YouTube and MySpace. Nokia, on the other hand will offer YouTube content through a web browser and its new Nokia Video Centre, over mobile video RSS feeds. You can check all 20 Nokia press releases released during 3GSM thanks to Stefan at RingNokia.

3UK announced Windows Live Messenger is now provided as a rich instant messenger mobile software client, allows 3 customers to see the “presence” of their Messenger contacts and exchange messages when these contacts that are on their PC or on the move with 3 mobile.

On the Mobile Search field I missed a panel with Daniel Appelquist - one of the real mobile illuminates I met during 3GSM but you can read a good review here at MoCoNews. Another session I had to miss due to the many meetings was the Technology Breakout session on Mobile Web 2.0 moderated by Ajit Jaokar with Jon von Tetzchner - CEO Opera Software, Alex Kummerman - CEO Clicmobile and David Wood - VP Research at Symbian. Alex sended me a link where you can view the session presentations, thanks! Interesting notice is also the transcription of Tim Berners Lee keynote at 3GSM by Ajit.

To close this part, a note that Second Life gets soon accessible from your mobile phone. According to MarketingVox and Reuters’ Second Life bureau Software from Comverse Technology will enable Second Life residents to visit the virtual world from their Java-enabled mobile devices.The software was developed over the last six months, well before the open-sourcing of the Second Life client, and relies on using a separate PC or server as an intermediary. Comverse has also created an application that allows Second Life to run on IPTV platforms. (picture © Reuters)

AWARDS

The GSM Association Announced on Tuesday its 2007 Global Mobile Awards Winners, an Oscar-a-like ceremony to celebrate the best in telecom industry. I was not there so I cannot really say anything about this show, apart from Shozu - which I mentioned yesterday, there are 2 winners I think deserve some more attention.

Most Innovative Technology Award went to Polymer Vision for its Rollable Displays. Polymer Vision has developed the world’s first rollable electronic display. For the first time in history a display can be rolled out to a greater size than the actual mobile device itself. It is easy to view, even in bright sunlight, and has significantly lower power requirements than an LCD display with backlight. Once the user has finished, the display can simply be rolled back into the device. This makes the rollable display the ideal solution for large displays in all types of mobile devices, without sacrificing device size or convenience.

Best Use of Mobile for Social & Economic Development Award went to GrameenPhone Ltd with its Healthline project. The “HealthLine” project is providing an opportunity for an interactive teleconference between any Grameenphone subscriber and a licensed physician, who is available round the clock and seven days of the week. Though emergency hotlines in many countries do exist, such a medical hotline (as HealthLine789), to a registered physician for advice for emergency, non-emergency or regular medical needs of a caller, is unique. Our record short shows that people have called from all parts of Bangladesh. So far the doctors received and answered a total of about 120,000 calls on as many as 79 many different medical complaints. Callers range from the common citizens, professionals, men from all walks of life and village doctors, etc.

You can view all GSM Award winners here.

MobileMonday, during 3GSM organised its Global Mobile Start-Up Peer Awards in Espacio Movistar, you can view the finalists and winners here.

A personal award I would like to give to the SUNDANCE Shorts as Most Efficient Service of the 3GSM Exhibition. The Sundance Film Festival unveiled five short films shot especially for mobile, which were immediately made available for download to mobile users, I just had to give my ScanDisk Memory Stick to the booth, and a couple of seconds later I had the shorts on my mobile phone, cool!

Some of the best demo’s I have seen came from unexpected corners, like the Alcatel-Lucent stand where - thanks to José Luis, I could view some of the best demo’s I have seen. Very promising stuff coming up the next years with IPTV, managed from your phone and/or PC to your TV-set. IN 2004 I heard the first time about IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) when researching for the MuLiMob project:

“The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a standardised Next Generation Networking (NGN) architecture for telecommunication operators that want to provide mobile and fixed multimedia services. It uses a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) implementation based on a 3GPP standardised implementation of SIP, and runs over the standard Internet Protocol (IP). Existing phone systems (both packet-switched and circuit-switched) are supported.”

Think about a lot of new services that are build around your SIP-client, when talking on the phone, you will be able to be in another IM chat, show a video, transfer files and discuss them while in your call or conference, etc. For me, one of the best advantages is to be able to have ONE ID based on your phone number or SIP-client to access all the services you need to access through applications or mobile web. OpenID is also working on this. A lot of new mobile services are to come in this area, I’ll be writing on this here later more in detail.

NETWORKING PARTIES

The best part of 3GSM for many people as it is a chance to meet new people and discuss off-topic on anything mobile MobileSunday Barcelona was relaxed and perfect to meet old and new pals to learn about insiders’ news before the event started. Thanks to Stuart for his participation to the wiki and for influencing partyStrands music live from Paris (!)

Best networking party was undoubtedly for many people at the Global Peer Awards since it was at the same time a gathering of many MobileMonday chapter organizers and Mobilists present, combined with a lot of fresh mobile start-ups, VC’s and other people form the industry. The dinner that followed was a great way to learn about anything mobile from a global MobileMonday point of view, lots of great people with great ideas!

Interacting with screens from your mobile phone might seem still seem a futuristic thought for many of you, yet during 3GSM this was already happening at many cool networking spots this year thanks to partyStrands. Another excellent networking party was the Swedish Beers UK, organised by blogging colleague Helen Keegan at bar BelChica. partyStrands was running in the background and ZDF TV thought this was all very cool to be broadcasted in homeland Germany. You can view the reportage they made here.

Afterwards partyStrands run at the Ericsson VIP party, a super cool DJ but she seemed to be the only lively female around amongst the senior Ericsson audience

On Wednesday I was at the 3GSM Mobile Mixer Party at Camp Nou (Barcelona Football Stadium), hosted by Wireless World Forum Group and IHo