I know the drill by now. Drink as much
coffee as I can. Avoid any cooked foodstuffs.
The Nokia stand has the best freebies.
These sage pieces of advice hold true at
MWC 2014 and, while my brain is still on a caffeine high, I thought I’d jot
down my impressions of day 1 at the FIRA.
One – there are a lot of cars
From ZTE to Telefonica to Qualcomm,
everyone in the value chain has cars on their stand. TF win the cool stakes by
having a Tesla Model S, which is an awesome piece of technology… but although
automotive telematics is clearly a market that they all want to play in, no one
is doing very much of substance.
Telefonica provide a SIM card for the Model
S. Qualcomm were showing off a stereo system and sat nav processor; ZTE an
extremely weak connected car app. What I take from this is that cars are
carrying much more computing and connectivity than ever before (no shit) and no
one in the telecoms value chain has figured out how to make money out of them.
Two – there are even more health apps
I’ll try and write a more in depth article
about this area, but to summarise, everyone who was showing connected car was
doing healthcare as well. There were gameified wi-fi toothbrushes, gameified
post-surgery apps, gameified… you get the idea. Again, the takeaway is that
there’s big money in health and welfare and the exact value capture mechanism
is unknown…
Three – phone and tablet innovation nowhere
to be seen
Sad to report that literally no piece of
hardware here has excited me. Phones and tablets remain black (occasionally
colourful) boxes. They’re a bit faster, a bit curvier and a bit cheaper – the
price point of a decent full screen smart phone is down to $50. But that’s it.
The category is exhausted from an excitement point of view and although it
remains profitable, we need something else to kick the industry on to another
level.
I haven’t found Blackberry yet. Or seen
one. I’ll let you know when I do!
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