This is an odd feeling: Standing in line for security at O’Hare… Idly reading Private Eye… Turning to page 27… WAIT a minute! That looks familiar! I wrote that!
Yes, yours truly has the dubious honour of having made Pseud’s Corner.
For those of you not familiar with the aforementioned organ, Private Eye is a satirical UK magazine that has a regular spot where outrageous quotes from the pretentious and precocious are paraded. Authors, actors, art critics and such like.
This week, a mobile CTO!Seems the editors look a shine to my Mobile Monday Barcelona introduction.
OK, so maybe it was a little heavy on the rhetoric, but still… I get to share this (perhaps dubious) honour with Fay Weldon, Ozwald Boateng and A.A. Gill – so it can’t be entirely bad.
Along the lines of ”how to [..] feed your CTO“, and “N things you didn’t know about blogger X“, I was staring at my cluttered desktop, wondering what it all means.
Featuring…
Yes, that pretty much sums up the last 3 months of my life. What’s on your desktop – and why?
…but I’ll keep it short. That I can so easily tells you everything you need to know about the show.
There’s a lot going on at the the Mobile World Congress, and of course there are lots of sub-markets and sub-industries being represented. But the thrust of the show is pure telecoms. Device and infrastructure vendors trying to wow network operators.
Everything else (in particular, hall 7, complete with porn and prayer room) is really just a side show. However important you think content provision are, you can guarantee the telecoms world doesn’t.
So, on that basis, the show was rather disappointing.
If the handsets launched were supposed to be some sort of comeback, then Cupertino will sleep easily. That side of the show was dominated by one company – who didn’t even turn up – and I thought everything else was utterly underwhelming. (At most I might see myself with an X1)
And on the network side, I’ve rather lost track. The acronyms are getting farcical. Too long for me to remember which ones are which, and which ones are actually synonyms for something else. So forgive my naive conclusion that there was little news there either.
In previous years, the implicit message from GSM was “We are the Masters of the Universe”. This year, there’s nervousness. This is an industry that knows it is about to be disrupted, but doesn’t quite know what to do about it.
On a personal note, the show was most notable for the number of virtual folks I finally got to meet: James Whatley gets special thanks for finding me a personal mobby. After days of being locked in with analysts and journalists, it was nice to come out blinking into the sun and meet people who speak my language 
I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the introduction of this year´s Peer Awards in Barcelona.
I hope it´s not to precocious to post the conent of a three minute speech! As it happened I deviated a fair deal, but the spirit was about right.
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Hello Barcelona. And welcome to you all.
We have an amazing afternoon ahead of ourselves. An amazing venue. An amazing city. An amazing organisation team, and of course amazing people. You know, this is not Mobile Monday Barcelona. This is Mobile Monday The World.
I feel honoured to have the chance to welcome you all today. To see such a talented collection of individuals in one room together – all under the banner of mobility – is truly exciting to me. Somehow I feel we are coming of age.
It is so easy to forget what the mobile industry is all about. Yes, its economics are very enticing. Yes, its trade shows are awe-inspiring. And of course the technology is always mind-blowing!
But it’s not really about any of those things. Our industry is about something else. About communication. And communication is about people, human beings. You might call them “users”, “subscribers”, “audiences”, or “eyeballs”. But they are human beings.
In fact you could say that the mobile world is the ultimate social network. One day it will be the size of the entire species. A vast and intelligent network of human beings. Our fellow human beings, wherever in the world they are.
And I have no doubt that that mobile environment must be used for good.
It is the human beings in this room that are making that happen. You, your friends and your colleagues around the world, are
the creative, disruptive, and pioneering force that must lie behind the grand mobile ambition.
All I am going to say about dotMobi is that we are here for no other reason that to help you realise that ambition.
What I see in front of me today is not a safe and lazy industry. You are not faceless brands, multi-national monopolies, or sanitised and defensive incumbents of some dull grey ecosystem.
No. You are the mobile mammals. You are the individuals, the entrepreneurs, the artists, the merchants, the craftsmen and women, the smart, ambitious, bright young things of all our mobile tomorrows.
So. The next time you are rewriting your business plan again or pitching your startup to yet another jaded investor, the next time you are up at three in the morning writing software to launch the following day, the next time you are in a sales meeting, telling sceptical potential customers that you have what it takes – I’ll be there with you. We’ll all be there with you. We’re a community. The Mobile Monday community.
And we have got what it takes.
And you do know that we are doing something quite special, don’t you? Nothing less than the formation and refinement of an entirely new medium. The reinvention of communication for the whole human species. Somebody in this room might be doing something that can change the human race, and that can change the world to make it somehow a better place.
That is a huge privilege and a huge responsibility. I trust we all take it very seriously.
Nevertheless, that is why this afternoon’s competitions are going to be very exciting. Good luck to you all and thank you!
