A crowd gathers at Mobile World Congress
A crowd gathers at Mobile World Congress

At the global carnival that is the Mobile World Congress, the city of Barcelona organized the flow of 72,000 fashionable visitors so efficiently that the city seems to have manifested the Internet’s original promise of extracting the friction that hinders people’s pursuit of happiness in the real world.

mobileworldBut the industry trends that I witnessed prove that the majority of the mobilerati is still treating the most personal of modern devices as smaller versions of the laptop, when in fact they can be the very things that take the Internet toward an evolutionary step of fulfilling its original promise.

A CARBON-NEUTRAL MWC

When I arrived at the airport, there was a Fast Track area where I could pick up my conference badge and a complimentary Metro card that extended through the four days of the event. Throughout the Fira Europa—the massive conference center the size of London-Gatwick airport—signs boasted the event’s carbon-neutrality. That’s no small feat considering the relatively spoiled lifestyles of the technorati in attendance.

FACEBOOK’S APP STRATEGY

Mark Zuckerberg at Mobile World Congress
Mark Zuckerberg at Mobile World Congress

I kept hearing Mark Zuckerberg’s name whispered in a rainbow of accents. It shouldn’t be surprising that a tech star of his stature was there, seeing as he needs to pitch Facebook’s mobile strategy of building an app ecosystem with the two characteristics that define the ultra-personal nature of the mobile experience, but which users can’t get on Facebook: anonymity and safety.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s pitch is spot-on, but foretells a colossal rebranding effort. I’ve written about how anonymity conflicts with Facebook’s religion of identity persistence. Let’s see how many of secure-messaging WhatsApp’s 450 million users defect now that Facebook surely will use their messages for advertising data.

ESSENTIAL INFO FREE FLOW

To attract the 6 billion people not using Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg’s other pitch is couched in providing a global social good—free wireless access to essential services like messaging, search and weather. This free flow of vital information harkens to Barcelona’s extraordinary organization of conference traffic from the city center, where most hotels are located, to the Fira Europa. Brandishing my free Metro card, I descended into the subway to find coordinators clad in red MWC vests, guiding event-goers to the right platforms in order to get us to the Fira Gran Via, where a line of shuttles waited to whisk us to the Fira Europa.

THE MOBILE AD TECH PIE

Still, there were places where people were talking behind Mr. Zuckerberg’s back. In the enormous exhibition spaces that the mobile carriers occupied, he represents lost revenue. Mobile operators will carry an estimated $79 per subscriber of advertising revenue through their networks in 2014, but the Verizons and Vodafones of the world get no cut of that enormous pie. Facebook, Google and their ilk get to keep it all. No one is crying for the carriers over this. But if there were solutions that allowed them to regain their share of the pie, then consumers might not be caught in the middle of the net-neutrality skirmish.

With that much ad revenue at stake, an ever-growing bevy of ad-tech startups has jumped into the game. In the App Planet section of the conference, it seemed that half of the exhibits housed companies promising to optimize, exchange, engage and deliver conversions and ROI in the same manner as online advertising.

BEACONS OF THE BLEEDING EDGE

A few of these companies inhabit the bleeding edge of mobile technology—the Internet of Things, where hardware, networks and ad tech converge in the real world with the vision of bringing you information on how to more easily get what you need when you need it without bothering you. One of the first manifestations of this promise comes in the form of beacons, and a few start-ups were showing off their solutions.

Manifesting the Internet’s frictionless promise in the real world can be a revelation, but it also can be a scary proposition. Mobile devices provide such personal experiences that the old models won’t work. If people are going to allow information to be pushed into the devices that they hold most near and dear, it needs to be highly personalized while being delivered safely. It’s a contradiction that the mobile industry needs to happily marry to gain consumer trust.

Think of it as guiding our pursuit of happiness toward carbon-neutrality.

Henry Lawson is the CEO of nFluence Media, a leader in consumer-powered mobile technology. nFluence was part of the Washington State Dept. of Commerce entourage that attended Mobile World Congress.

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