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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 IHollywoodForum… It was a real a bummer, not enough people showed up for the conference thus few people stayed for the networking cocktail, too bad… Luckily there was the MTV Party at Bar13 which was loaded with people (what can you expect?) but it was real good fun, far away from the more boring conference stuff. MyStrands blog has some pictures of that evening.

Thursday closing night we met up with some friends and collegues for dinner, drinks and dancing afterwards… Now this one was really private All in all, it’s great to have 3GSM in Barcelona; I’m looking forward to the one next year again!

You can view my 3GSM Flickr Photoset here.

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Wednesday Nokia anounced it’s Gizmo collaboration for the N80 Internet Edition, Thursday I made my first SIP call with Andy straight from my laptop to his wi-fi connected n80 somewhere out there in the hills of California. The quality and easyness of use of Gizmo connecting to a mobile phone was excellent; on the other side of the (un)wire, Andy states:

My experience with it has been nothing less than spectacular. Fully integrated VoIP on a very high quality mobile phone is a dream come true.

I beam the experience!

The plugin is not yet available for other phones but the news is a blessing coming to aid soon now for my recent phonebills. SIP is the most popular Voice over IP (VoIP) standard. SIP enables two or more people to make phone calls to each other using the Internet to carry the call. SIP calls are part of the Internet you get great features like free voicemail to email and phone numbers from many places in the world no matter where you live.

From the Nokia pressrelease:

Nokia N80 Internet Edition users download the free Gizmo VoIP settings from the Download! folder in their device, automatically beginning the installation process. During installation, users go through a simple two-step process for creating a free account that they’ll use to make Internet calls. Other capabilities, such as customizing voicemail greetings, purchasing Gizmo Call Out credit for dialing landlines and mobile devices and managing Gizmo account settings are available by using the Nokia N80 Internet Edition to browse the www.gizmovoip.com web site.

Kudos to Nokia and Gizmo for creating such an easy to read and understand miniwebsite. All details on the collaboration can be found for web- and mobile users, every single step to start using Gizmo on the N80 is documented with screenshots and easy to read explanations. I can’t wait to try this on my phone myself. For the lucky ones who own a N80, you can download the Gizmo N80 client here.

Computerworld reports on some analysis from Darren Siddall, an analyst at Gartner:

“The seemingly opposing offerings from Nokia indicate a general hedging of bets in the mobile world, on one hand, operators don’t want their networks to be used mainly by services they aren’t making money on. But they also want to discover which applications are popular with users and figure out how to earn revenue from such services. There’s a lot of uncertainty about which applications users will find valuable.”

Technology changes the way we communicate, business models change accordingly in a natural way, this process is happening for a while now and it certainly won’t stop anytime soon…

Cool Devices, gartner, gizmo, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, n80, nokia, Operators, sip, skype, Trends, user experience, voip, wi fi