The 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the biggest cell-phone show in the world. The only thing that comes close is CTIA, the wireless industry show in Las Vegas, usually in April. For the past several years, MWC has been held in Barcelona, Spain. Last year the attendance was just a bit over 55,000. But with the economic downturn, I am guessing less than 50,000 this year—or so it seems, as it isn’t nearly as crowded.

My usual gig is to interview representatives from as many companies as possible to discover the latest products and technologies so I can write about them for you. However, on this first day I was invited to be the host of the GSM Association’s Mobile Innovation Global Competition. This multiday event concludes the final stages of a year-long search for the world’s top mobile innovator as decided by a panel of judges. The whole purpose of this program is to match up the mobile industry’s top company innovators and entrepreneurs with investors, mobile network operators, and key industry suppliers and corporate partners for all over the world.

The competition gives the 15 finalists selected from over 100 entries a chance to describe what they do in front of a distinguished panel of judges. This year’s panel included Paolo Paganucci of Telecom Italia, Stephen Glagow of Orange, Cheol Kim of SK Telecom, Marcos Battisti of Intel Capital, and Mike Short of Telefonica Europe. The finalists get six minutes to make their pitch to the judges. The judges then ask questions for up to eight minutes. Some questions may come from the audience. Monday’s presentations included IntelliNet Technologies USA, Wind Mobile Poland, Sunbay Ltd Switzerland, Mobile Nordic Norway, Suntrica Finland, and Mobilizy Austria.

• IntelliNet develops core network infrastructure software including security gateways, signaling gateways, and protocol stacks.
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  Wind Mobile develops pre-integrated services like custom ringback tones, presence notification, and a USSD gateway.
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  Sunbay develops network optimization software.
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  Mobile Nordic develops search software for directory services.
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  Suntrica develops solar battery-charging products.
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  Mobilizy develops handset software focusing on location-based services and augmented reality.

After lunch, there was a terrific panel chaired by Alan Macintosh of Acta Wireless. The panelists included Glenn Lurie of AT&T, Andrea Traversone of Amadeus Partners, and Andrew Gilbert of Qualcomm and MediaFLO. The topic was “The New Embedded Mobile Economy.” With about 90% cell-phone penetration in the U.S., many experts are expecting the growth in cellular to come from embedded applications. This is where cell phones in built into other products like laptops, netbooks, cameras, and portable navigation devices (GPS) will come into play.

The cellular dongles and plug-in cards are giving way to fully embedded cell phones. A large part of the growth is expected to come from the M2M sector, which includes telemetry and remote control. A good example of a recent application is Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which embeds a cdma cell phone that can download books directly from Amazon. Look for many more of these applications in the future.

The afternoon session included nine more presentations by Codasystem France, TxtTrans United Kingdom, Worldmate, 4M Wireless, Nanoradio AD Sweden, Intivation Holland, APiLINX, Mob4hire Inc., and Advanced Receiver Technologies. The products and services ranged all over the place from chips to software to end applications.

• Codasystem’s clever digital photography software allows pictures captured with a digital phone camera to be validated with a proof of creation. It uses cryptograpy, steganography, watermarking, digital signature, and time stamping.
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  TxtTrans provides software for the marketing or payment of goods or services through a mobile phone or the Internet using credit or debit cards.
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  Worldmate has created travel software that allows a user to track, make, change, and otherwise manage all aspects of travel on the cell phone. It also provides push alerts on airline changes.
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  4M Wireless has created a 3GPP LTE protocol stack for mobile devices, handsets, and other forthcoming LTE wireless devices.
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  Nanoradio has developed ultra-low-power single-chip Wi-Fi devices for handsets.
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  Intivation has developed a chip that converts the 0.5-V output of a solar cell directly to 3.7 V, which is commonly used in handsets.
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  APiLINX has developed a remote patient monitoring system to track medical conditions faster and less expensively.
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  Mob4hire has developed a broker system and software for matching up developers with high-quality testers for new products.
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  Advanced Receiver Technologies has created a clever interference cancelling system called Single Antenna Interference Cancellation – Joint Detection that replaces existing rake and equalization receivers in WCDMA handset boosting performance by as much as 7 dB at the cell edge.

All of these companies have indeed created innovative products and services. The judges clearly had their work cut out for them.

Mobile Dev & Design is a media partner with the GSM Association and pleased to be a part of this significant competition to find the most innovative product or application. We’ll have more later on who won.

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