Day 1, Mobile World Congress, Barcelona

First, we woke dreading the crowds, the lines, the herds of people that would slow down my routes. Then we got to MWC and found no lines, no waiting and bocadillos to spare. And, taxis. Taxis everywhere! What was going on here? Was this MWC in Barcelona? It turns out, it was and is Barcelona – the lovely feel of Cannes in Barcelona. People were in a good moods, there were no annoying crowds and busines was being conducted.

Today on the list for cool things was a Dutch company called zCapes, which is making a mobile mini blog. We met them at the Mobile Monday Peer awards and they had just launched one day ago and as we move to more start ups that start with the letter Z – here is Zentym – a mobile TV advertising company based out of Madrid that we had previously met at the European Venture Summit – this time out of the gate with a powerful message and lots of operators nibbling at their toes.

One of our favorite companies from Sweden, JayCut was on of the hosts at the Sweden Mobile Association cocktail hour and proved their online video editing product has a B2B play. Another cool company from Sweden was TAT – The Astonishing Tribe. I think by far they have the coolest logo and they are 100% focused on delivering a god user interface for mobile — combining design and technology. Tattletech will post an interview with Charotta Taranger of TAT this week.

But the one thing that we believe is out of control is all the emphasis on mobile in terms of LBS. Yes we know it is a mobile show – but can we have a reality check? Forty mobile companies presented at the Mobile Monday Peer Awards today – 40!  Lots of duplicates and clones and look alikes out there – the market will consolidate and in six months, many of those companies will be gone.  In the long term, yes its true, all that we know and love will be on the mobile, but the Web will not go away. The lines will become blurred so this means that when we are talking about LBS – we should remember that there are more than 500 million users on Web based social networking sites and those users will want to evolve their social network.

According to Frank Schuil, CEO, IRL, the Web will not go away – the web is a natural extension of mobile and vice versa – they complete each other. Innovation will take place at the intersection of the web and mobile. The key will be to unlock the value of location for those 506 million online users and then bring them to the mobile.

On another note, there are less scantily clad women at this show – thank god for the recession. --JLH

Tags: Frank Schuil, IRL Connect, IRL Corporate, Mobile World Congress, Social network service