Relentless hustle and bustle…
…and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Barcelona and Mobile World Congress 2013 is over. Deep breath? Nah, not really. Up by 6am this morning – spring is here, the sun is out, the eyes fly open. Also, we’ve already started talking about the content for our next public gathering – in roughly 30 days. How will we take the best of Barcelona and whittle it down into a 30-minute direct presentation? The news releases, the presentations from others in the industry, the meetings, the imagery, the people all around us. The “buzz.” Perhaps I can start with a few reflections here, and see what sticks.
Our Ericsson city – now there’s some hustle and bustle. The constant flow of people is energizing. Park benches made it easy to stop a minute for that chance conversation that might have planted a seed for a project later on, a video to produce, an interview to follow up (at least in my case). Other conversations are more likely to be sales leads. This year, we had a couple of hands-on demos that looked fun. Visitors tried their hand at designing a heterogenous network in the city, or installing a radio base station in record time. You might think that business-to-business doesn’t affect you, but here in Hall 2, you got to be part of it.
Overall, Ericsson’s story starts from the foundation – the network – and reaches into the intangible – the cloud, collaboration, and electronic dance music. We talk about the beginnings of connectivity – where our Amazon Connection project won the GSMA Mobile Award for best product in an emerging market – and we talk about how to push the most modern networks to do very advanced, real-time functions like LTE Broadcast or making sure the audience at NASCAR can share video during high traffic and high-data-intensity.
One of my all-time favorite Ericsson speakers (besides the obvious – HansV) is Geoff Hollingworth. Have you read his paper? During a panel at AppPlanet, Geoff tied it all together and said: “We believe in a society that’s going from six billion connected devices to 50 billion connected everything. If you build an app without considering the network, it’s like building a race car without considering which wheels to put on.” Geoff runs the AT&T Foundry for Ericsson out in Silicon Valley, and he always brings a perspective that, if you haven’t already started thinking about it, you will from now on.
These were the topics that were everywhere in Barcelona, not just from us, but from other industry players as well: Connecting everything, new devices, WebRTC and operating systems, virtualization. Software-defined networks. Cloud, cloud, cloud. De-materializing our economy and putting the network to use in multiple contexts. Connected cities were everywhere – not just in Hall 2, but from AT&T in Hall 3, and from GSMA (the overall event organizer) and several other service providers, including but not limited to Telenor and Vodafone.
How to make it all happen? One thing is for sure. Nobody is arrogant enough to do it alone. We are all talking about collaboration and partnerships. I’m excited to see what comes out of our partnerships with Mozilla – where we can take operator assets and embed them into the Firefox browser for ultimate convenience for consumers – and SAP – where we take machine-to-machine connectivity and help operators support big businesses in mobilizing their processes and applications. Time will tell, but these are the kinds of partnerships that will deliver on bringing the Networked Society to life.
So if I were to come back around to the analogy from my pre-Barcelona blog, I’d say this about summer camp: I met some new friends from some pretty cool places – companies like Mozilla and SAP, based in California, Germany, England, everywhere. I heard some new languages (coding stuff that I’ll probably forget in a week…). And I am inspired, by the momentum that is created when 72,000 people bring their passion and professionalism into one place for three short but very lond days. For the record: when Mom and Dad ask, I’ll say it went “fine.”
Until next time, have a great school year!
For more images from MWC 2013, check out our Flickr page.
Written by Dodi Axelson
Dodi Axelson is a multimedia producer at Ericsson headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden, where she makes videos about Ericsson news and employees and about the latest telecom innovations. In addition she takes to the stage to moderate large Ericsson events. She has been asking the important questions ever since she started her journalism career in newsradio in Seattle, Washington.
