What's left after Mobile World Congress 2012?

The Mobile World Congress 2012 has been just concluded on 1st of march 2012. The event saw a lot of promising exposure of technology, array of new devices, biceps of tech giants including Samsung, Nokia, Google Android, Intel and lot of small companies.

The event did have its ups and down though. The much talked about public transport strike nearly broke the nose of the event. The strike of all public transport including trains, metro and taxis just only called off at an early morning when the event was to be inaugurated. The event saw on the 3rd day – a huge student protest to advocate the prevention of mobile usage affecting their life right in front of Fira De Barcelona, at Plaça Espanya. However, the event surroundings were cordoned by the local police in anti-riot get up ending up no disturbance done to the event itself. Mobile World Congress nearly got away with all and many other unseen tragedies.

Talking about the situation within the walls of the exhibition – encountering with the small company stalls, we found that their primary focus for their participation is for business acquisition and not for portraying their core progress of technology. It was sad so see less Indian companies – just because of this very reason. Exhibiting at Mobile World Congress wasn’t cheap. It asked for too much investment and setup efforts. Some of them did succeeded at appearing at the show – but it is only left to time how well they have succeeded in their efforts to leverage their presence by getting business. (?)

While on the other hand – the big giants did make their mark and made the presence felt by launching new stuff as well as capturing visitors. There was quite of interesting stuff was to be seen to attract visitors – from Russian dancers, free coffee, ice creams, playing lotteries to win handset, showing device demos by well known artists etc.

The other question was regarding the network companies. The ever growing app market brings a lot of smart apps that helps the consumers use the internet based apps – eventually reducing the network traffic. This directly affects the network revenues – by implicitly providing parallel services of voices, messengers and value added services. Having said that, there was a ray of light behind the scenes by Facebook’s latest interest in tying up with network companies for FB’s own value added services and premium content.

All and all – a very successful event I must say considering the portrayal of variety of direction the Wireless community is going to and alternate road maps to get maximum user engagement.

Looking from over the top from perspective of technical companies – it is a crucial decision to make for themselves – weather to be a producer of the technology of a just consume it and build better apps.

However – the biggest mystery was to miss Apple at Mobile World Congress. No wonder apple won’t show up here – that’s not their way of showcasing the products. But I guess the entire community did expect some presence of apple in such a gathering of all corners of mobile industry. Apple being market leader – did make their fans like me miss something within the exhibition.

Considering this scenario – is Mobile World Congress the only we could see where mobile is going? Are there other avenues being explored behind the curtains? I am sure there are people and stuff growing outside Fira Montjuic and they have yet to surprise the world.

Your thoughts?