Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2018 – What I’m Looking Out For

Another Mobile World Congress is upon us! Last year’s edition broke yet another attendance record, rounding out at 108,000 visitors and occupying every last corner of the substantial conference space that the Fira de Barcelona boasts. The congress extends its reach far into the city over the course of the week, with restaurants, hotels, and hot nightspots teeming over with visitors and booked out far in advance.

For the last several years I’ve been lucky to visit firsthand as an attendee, first during business school at ESADE and now representing the IoT Solutions World Congress. My team and I will be there with our partner, the Industrial Internet Consortium, and will meet with industrial IoT companies, tech clusters, governmental organizations, etc. developing projects in the sector.

No matter what your goals are for MWC, the week inevitably results in an exhausting but very fulfilling experience. As part of the noisiest mobile gathering globally, every organization that participates is vying for a snippet of your attention; indeed many organizations reserve their most important and creative launches for Mobile World Congress, so it’s worth keeping an eye open for upcoming trends and new players in lots of different verticals.

That said, one can’t be everywhere at once, so each year I narrow down a list of a few curated highlights that I’d really like to focus on.

Last year’s MWC theme was a slightly ambiguous “The Next Element,” while this year’s is “Creating a Better Future,” which seems marginally more concrete. There does appear to portend a focus for 2018 on the transformational capabilities of certain technologies, for example 5G and AI.

Some major themes I’ll be sniffing around:

5G Networks

Last year there was a lot of buzz around 5G proofs-of-concept, with much effort devoted to simply explaining what the new standard might do for networks and hypothesizing the verticals that could consequently see the most benefit.

From what I’ve seen, some early 5G-connected devices will be on show, and companies will bring use cases for everything from first network rollout plans to consumer IoT to more mature enterprise solutions. I’m curious to see how genuinely commercial the products and services on offer are, as opposed to still in concept mode.

Artificial Intelligence

This is by far my favorite theme for MWC18. Artificial Intelligence will be omnipresent across all verticals, platforms, devices; you name it. There seems to be equal push for both consumer and enterprise AI, while in the case of IoT by comparison, the wow-factor will be weighted on the enterprise side.

As usual with AI, performance boasts need to be taken with a measure of skepticism, since reciting out a weather forecast isn’t nearly as complicated as, say, getting a device’s AI assistant to determine which type of flowers to send to a friend, or more complex behavioral algorithms or machine learning, for example.

Regardless, many companies will be peddling their AI wares at MWC so I’ll stop by a few places like LG for example, meant to be doing AI in its mobile devices. Curious to see how it compares with the Siri-Alexa-Cortana sisterhood. I’ll also look to see who’s working on the nexus of blockchain, industrial IoT, and AI.

Net Neutrality

More political than almost any other topic at MWC18, net neutrality will definitely elicit some strong opinions this year. The subject continues to tumble around regulatory circles with combative legal pushes from both tech heavy-hitters and consumer groups.

Ajit Pai from the FCC (now under investigation for corruption charges) is still scheduled to attend MWC after skipping CES in Las Vegas last month due to death threats over net neutrality. I’m not expecting that anything truly tectonic will be negotiated during MWC, but there should still be some interesting conversations regardless.

Smartphones Galore

Both Samsung and Huawei were reported to be presenting new top-of-the-line models at this year’s MWC. I’ll definitely try to get some time with the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+, if I can wiggle in among the crowds. Huawei seems to have backed off a launch of its new P-series but perhaps we’ll have a last-minute surprise. Other groups presenting new devices are said to be Asus, Sony and Lenovo, for example, so I’ll keep an eye out for that.  

I expect some hallway chatter too about whether all the fuss around 5G might actually hinder device sales, as consumers and enterprise purchasers potentially forego investment decisions until they see which devices will be 5G-capable.

What’s Coming From China?

Both myself and the IoT Solutions World Congress are looking east lately. After a fascinating visit to Shanghai and the World Internet Conference in WuZhen last December, I’m interested in seeing what China brings to the MWC table this year. I’m looking forward to closer inspection of Huawei, AliBaba, Baidu, China Mobile, and a gaggle of smaller players to see what’s coming down the pipeline. Huawei and Baidu for example recently signed a deal to co-create a new artificial intelligence platform, which may have some interesting pre-promotion.

What did I see at the World Internet Conference in China?

China is definitely booming, nowhere more so than last week at the World Internet Conference and Internet of Light Expo in WuZhen, China.

WuZhen is often referenced as a weekend escape for megalopolis-fatigued Shanghai residents, a restful palatte of sky-reflecting canals and traditional Chinese buildings, with a history dating hundreds of years.

Not so this week, when the city transforms into a full-throttle international summit on the state of the internet.

I was invited to represent the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona, and to meet with Chinese government officials and companies to discuss the development of the industrial Internet of Things sector. I’d done some research into the conference before arriving, but initial information was limited, coy almost. The Cyberspace Administration of China promised high-level government officials and tech icons, but the agenda was only loosely descriptive.

My Shanghai-born seatmate on the flight to China, who seemed impressed that I was going to the summit, highlighted that this was, in fact, a big deal, at least domestically. Her casual shrug and comment when I asked her if China was proud to have developed the conference: “Where best to do something this big than in a country that can build a city in a day?”

She wasn’t kidding. On the ride into WuZhen from Shanghai, multiple security stops underscored what one fellow attendee later referred to as “Fortress WuZhen.” Security began kilometers outside of town; at one point the car was stopped on the highway and I was told to get out, walk to an outbuilding brimming with police and military, and submit myself and my luggage to a full examination.

That’s when I noticed that the entire structure, from the buildings to the road-block barriers to the landscaping, was all newly-constructed. As in, even the soil surrounding the trees and plants was still fresh.

The first order of business at the hotel was checking connectivity- Gmail ok on my phone but not my laptop; Outlook and WhatsApp functional; Google Maps fine but Google search, no; Twitter not flying; Instagram and Facebook asocial; VPN not VPNing. Not to mention that WiFi for the entire city was accessed through one landing page set up specifically for the conference. Later, my invariably gracious hosts helped me arrange transportation to the conference the next day and even introduced me to a pair of attendees from Hong Kong, with whom I ended up becoming friends.

The next morning, at the exhibition hall, Winter Is Coming was no joke- the heating was off and all doors flung open to the cold, the latter presumably to facilitate traffic flow for the thousands of visitors. I shivered in my suit, while better-prepared attendees puffed around in thick coats, toting thermoses of hot drinks.

A quick tour of the exhibitors showed the Chinese internet industry at its most potent. New-but-heavy hitters like AliBaba, TenCent, Xiaomi, and Baidu mingled with more august peers such as SAP and GM, though even the latter was showcasing OnStar navigation products developed specifically for the Chinese market. China Mobile, China Telecom and their peers boast user numbers enviable for any telco, and showcased an incredibly sophisticated array of both consumer and B2B products and solutions.

Immediately obvious was that China is lightyears ahead in terms of mobile payments and mobile services integration. A common refrain in conversation went something like “I haven’t taken money out of an ATM, or even carried a wallet, in a year.” The Star Trek-era coffee machine in the hotel lobby rejected all payment options apart from scanning a QR code produced by one of a variety of apps such as AliPay.

Even business cards were completely passé; new contacts frowned when I asked for one. All personal information was exchanged by scanning the QR code in your WeChat app, a hybrid texting/Facebook/Instagram platform that also allowed me to put in notes about the conversation, and for which I scrambled to set up a profile within minutes of arriving at the venue.

Other highlights were a battery of artificial intelligence startups, many showcasing Siri-Alexa-Echo-esque devices attentive to various home or business voice-commands. One robot blinked shyly when it didn’t know the answer to a question.

Almost all participants were from China, and with some dismay I recognized that I was missing out on a lot of good stuff due to my total lack of comprehension of the world’s foremost language. Before I wised up and brought warmer clothes, it was so cold that I was eventually driven from the exhibition hall, slinking into a presentation room where people huddled on benches watching what appeared to be an auction to buy a wedding dress. I wiggled down between a pair of suitably warm-looking attendees before a neighbor explained the auction was actually to purchase discounted shares in a FinTech start-up. The wedding dress was the auctioneer’s assistant. I quickly downloaded a pocket translator.

The true high wattage came on the second day, when the promised “high-level officials and tech icons” were presented to the attendees at the opening ceremony. In addition to a battery of local and national political figures, a few previously-unannounced jaw-droppers gave remarks:

·        Tim Cook of Apple- “It’s up to us to ensure that technology is infused with humanity… I don’t worry about machines thinking like humans, I worry about people thinking like machines”

·        Jack Ma of Alibaba- “In the next 30 years we’ll turn machines into human beings, but we should have confidence we can control them…if machines replace human jobs, we will be subsequently involved in more creative work, which is an area robots will never be able to replicate”

·        Terry Gou, Chairman of Foxconn

·        Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-Founder of AirBnB

·        Greg Geng, VP of TenCent in charge of WeChat Pay

·        Jim Hackett, President and CEO of Ford Motor Company

·        John Hoffman, CEO GSMA

·        Robin Li, Co-Founder Chairman and CEO of Baidu

·        Dominique de Villepin, former Prime Minister of France

As each presenter spoke, on the floor-to-ceiling screen behind him (all men, by the way) flashed the conference tagline: “Developing Digital Economy For Oppenness and Shared Benefits,” arguable positioning depending on your audience. If indeed China’s “one belt and one road” initiative will “also be beneficial to the cyber community, contributing to the digital economy, creating unprecedented value for the human race,” as explained one government official, there may be some recalibration with simultaneously “respecting cyber sovereignty to build cooperation and consensus on the Internet.” In fact several news outlets, e.g. the New York Times, were excluded from the conference due to their prior probing of the issue.

On my third and final day, I had been asked to give a presentation on trends and developments in the industrial IoT sector. I discussed how industrial IoT was no longer merely conceptual for organizations playing with proof-of-concepts models, but rather had evolved into large-scale deployments, pushing companies to really evaluate their ROI. I also touched on the increasing symbiosis with other sectors such as artificial intelligence and Blockchain, to take IoT beyond simply the collection of data from sensors, and enrich it to help make prescriptive, human-like decisions for organizations.

Finally, back in Shanghai for a day, the woman who had been my seatmate on the flight over invited me to lunch. When we had met, she was returning from a trade mission to Morocco where, she said, China has an open strategy of entering African markets through infrastructure development in a way that gives them a substantial toe-hold economically as well as culturally, in a way that decades of American-style aid models have failed to gain much traction. By the end of the week, I was not at all surprised by that strategy. The mighty dragon is alive and growing, and I felt honored to be a part of it.