Friday: Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 2009 - Next big thing?

Next week the biggest telecom event of the year takes over Barcelona. We will be at the fair as usual networking and checking out what others are doing. If you haven't already then please contact us for a meeting.

This year we will look out for

• anything app-store related from Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, etc (big question is how they will succeed where e.g. Handango has previously failed)
• to what extent mobile content and services companies can continue to push advertisement based business model in the current climate
• what Sun has to say about the future of mobile Java (they have some kind of an announcement)
• mobile e-mail - can someone really offer a consumer e-mail service that is close to the experience of the Blackberry but without needing a special handset and mobile operator subscription. Momail is one very interesting company in this space!
  
• location based communities - Google just launched Altitude and there are about 50 other companies out there with similar services but is there anything truly disruptive? We are obviously biased as close partners to GeoMe but we think that GeoMe could be the answer!
  

See you at the fair!

3333 Mobile Devices

Less than one year after setting up a new phone database for the mobile websites and applications delivered by Golden Gekko on behalf of clients and partners the database has reached the magical number of 3333 unique phone models (e.g. Nokia N95, Nokia N96, Blackberry 8310, Sony-Ericsson W810 and so on).


Is this a milestone? Not really but it does show the complexity of delivering mobile applications and sites compared to the web. These 3333 phones each have a unique specification including user agent, screen resolution, application size (jar size), Java JSR support, Java exceptions, browser type, image support and lots of other variables that have to be checked when a site or application is rendered on the device.

How many unique mobile internet enabled phones are there then? Across the globe people estimate at least 5000 (and growing) different phone models with mobile internet browser so we are still some way off to covering all of them. With the current growth in services using our platform we expect to be considerably closer by the end of 2009 but who knows how many it will be by then…