James Connelly is co-founder of Fetch
As you walk around the vast exhibitor halls of MWC, and pass by the hordes of suited and booted mobile players from every corner of the world, you can’t help but sense that you are at the heart of a truly transformative industry sector.
Powered by the multitude of hardware, software and service providers packed under the Fira de Barcelona roofs you sense that the mobile industry today reaches far beyond simple handheld telephony and is now starting to tangibly change us and the world that surrounds us.
Alongside the new device launches from the likes of Samsung (with their S5), Sony (with their Xperia Z2), Huawei (with their MediaPad X1) and Blackberry (with the Q20), you can feel that the industry is now transforming human connectivity and our interactions with technology. As well as the growing raft of wearable technologies (like Samsung’s new Gears and Huawei’s new Talkband) enabling the quantified self, there are providers here offering gesture recognition and haptic touch feedback to improve human computer interaction.
You can see how the industry is now transforming our homes, cities and urban environments. Presentations and speeches herald the dawn of ‘Smart Cities: Smarter Living’ and ‘The Connected Lifestyle: Transforming Industries’. In these we heard how people are becoming surrounded by an increasing array of connected devices and the impacts and implications of this.
And the industry is not just confining itself to the developed world, but with the introduction of cheaper smartphones (with Mozilla’s $25 device built in partnership with Spreadtrum) and the likes of ‘mobile first’ Facebook’s Internet.org, the industry is starting to transform the less developed world as well.
And of course the mobile industry is transforming businesses and organisations. In the ‘Media without Borders’ seminar we heard how content publishers, like the FT, were having to deliver content consistently across multiple screens by developing universal publishing practices. And Dolby described the mobile impact on the future of entertainment.
From an advertising perspective, all these impacts of mobile technology are not only opening up new and exciting ways to engage with consumers wherever they might be but also is producing great, new volumes of mobile consumer data that as yet remain untapped.