Pirouz Nilforoush

I spent this past week in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress - the world’s largest conference for the mobile industry. Overall people shared a ton of excitement with respect to the state of the mobile industry as a whole and I wanted to share the big trends that I was able to unfold during my time in Barcelona:

We are moving towards a networked society - where instead of all people being connected all things will be connected - built on mobility, broadband, and cloud (apps) we will start seeing connectivity in industries such as auto and health. Operators believe that this will fuel growth in the number of mobile connections in the coming years making 100 billion mobile connections a reality in the next 10-20 years - imaging SIM cards in almost every thing!

4G will start seeing real adoption in 2011 - Major carriers in the US including Verizon and AT&T have either already begun launching LTE networks in major cities or have planned launches by mid year 2011. Why it matters? LTE will provide us with consistent 8-10mbps mobile broadband speeds which will open up a whole new world of opportunities with apps that can be developed to take advantage of the increased speeds.

NFC payments are gaining momentum - with McDonalds placing contactless readers in over 1200 stores in the UK we might be seeing a tipping point for NFC. In Japan 60% of mobile users use NFC and we’re bound to see similar numbers here in the US in the coming years. Mobile operators want to be the enablers and consumers find it attractive to get rid of pockets full of cards.

Mobile app ad revenues will see accelerated growth - Sir Martin Sorrell from WPP mentioned that research they have seen predicts mobile ad revenues by end of 2013 will account for 1/3 of all mobile app revenues and we are just starting to scratch the surface with total app revenues as adoption of smart phones continue into the mainstream.

Mobile broadband adoption will have a significant impact on the society - with over five billion mobile subscriptions worldwide we are moving towards 80% of the worlds population being connected. What’s more exciting is that over one billion people will have mobile broadband access by the end of this year and that is significant given the fact that every 1000 new mobile broadband connections generate 80 new jobs and every 10% increase in mobile connections grow GDP by 1%!

If you had a chance to attend this conference please let me know of your thoughts in the comments.