Barcelona Diary: Blogging from MWC 2012

It’s Mobile World Congress time again, and as it has done for the past few years, the GSMA sponsored World Congress is being held in Barcelona, Spain from February 27 to March 1. (There is a smaller Asia themed GSMA congress held in Hong Kong usually in November). The World Congress is the biggest mobile tech show of the year, eclipsing events like the American-themed CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. At least 60,000 attendees are expected this year, so this is one major mobile gig indeed.

Starting with this post, I’ll be posting a  daily “Barcelona Diary” chronicling the events of Mobile World Congress 2012 aka “#MWC“. My reasons for doing so are simple. I think the events of this week will have a profound effect on the mobile industry for the rest of the year – and doing a journal will be an effective way of forcing me to take note and remember. Because an announcement on Monday just change the whole landscape for 2012.

For sure there are going to be major announcements from Google – the search and mobile OS behemoth was a non presence at CES. But my sources there have informed me that they intend to “complete dominate” #MWC 2012.

The name of the game is Android, and it is going to be hard to miss the green droid character all over MWC.

Expect a gargantuan Google booth area,  some major Android announcements (after Ice Cream Sandwich,  enter JellyBean), and people trying to collect Android pins from the booths,

Android devices from the major South Korea (Samsung and LG), Taiwan (HTC and Asus), and Chinese manufacturers (notably Huawei and ZTE) will be all over the place. The Chinese companies are very aggressive this year – Huawei has an entire hall all to itself.

Other Mobile operating systems will be jostling for the spotlight as well. Ubuntu for Android will be debuting, and there’s talk of a Mozilla Mobile OS as well. Hence the Firefox booth I spied being setup in Hall 7.

And what about Microsoft, the erstwhile behemoth of the 90s? Windows 8 “Consumer Preview” will manage to make its Feb deadline and will launch on Feb 29 (the last day of February).

I’m here as part of a team manning the WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) booth at Hall 7 (7C82 to be exact). WAC is a global community of operators who have banded together to develop operator-friendly app development standards (embodies in SDFs and APIs) Situated inside the “App Planet” area, the WAC presence at #MWC will herald the first “WAC 2.0″ HTML5 based apps out of Korea and apps developed using Network APIs for in-app charging from Korea and the Philippines.

And if all that is whizzing past over your head, here is a WAC primer I found this may explain this better:

Ka-Ching: In-App Mobile Charging is Now in the Philippines – and the World

This PR just in from Smart – the first Android mobile apps using the WAC NAPI (Network API) are out – and they are all coming out first from the Philippines. 

What’s the significance? Well apart from the Philippines being a development hub for these WAC (Wholesale Applications Community) apps – the Network API enables what mobile developers in this part of the world have been clamoring for some time: In-App Operator Charging.

What this means is that mobile developers who sign up to use the API can now charge customers for use of the app from inside the application itself. And instead of requiring some form of credit card registration for online payments, the payment (purchase, or whatever) will be charged to your cellphone. For prepaid users this means it can deduct from your load, and for postpaid users it means this amount gets added to your bill.

For a society where the lack of widespread use of credit cards has hampered online purchasing, this is a pretty big deal. It opens up the floodgates for all sorts of transactions via mobile.

And just as importantly, it opens up a new method of monetization for mobile developers in the Philippines and the rest of the world.

A WAC app with charging APIs doesn’t just work in the Philippines, it will work in any country with a WAC operator partner.

Available first for Android devices, the API will eventually be available to other platforms and the mobile web. Apple permitting, maybe even on iOS apps (well if Apple relaxes its policies on in-app purchasing that is…)

More on this development in subsequent blog posts, but in the meantime, the full global PR announcement is below: