55,000 people can't be wrong. The Mobile World Congress (formerly 3GSM) has done it again and broken another record in Barcelona. What this means for us of course is that we simply had to line up longer to get in.
But in all seriousness, it is a damn fine show where you can meet a very concentrated mobile crowd from all over the world. It's not like CES where most people are there to see the latest robotic dog that plays mp3s and spies on your friends. This is a hardcore concentration of thousands of people who come to do just one thing - talk shop about mobile!
For anyone who's seen us at this show in the past, you'll know we usually have a pretty cool custom built stand with a bunch of demo stations, the odd unicyclist, and generally irritate our neighbors in their penguin suits as we strut around in jeans, sneakers and hoodies blaring out a bit of Linkin Park. But in 2008 we didn't need a stand because our partners like Motorola, Samsung and Ubiquisys were graciously doing the hard work for us! This year was not about standing on a soapbox and telling the world who we are, because people were actively seeking us out instead. Although somebody forgot to send me the memo and I turned up in a hoodie anyway.
Motorola had an impressive display, surprisingly on par with their CES stand:
Everyone loved the Moto Z10 because of the awesome multimedia features and ShoZu pre-loaded, woot!
Here's what they all came to see... video straight from the Z10 to YouTube in real time:
Samsung put in a lot of effort as usual, not just on their stand but the 10 story advertising banners which were draped all across Barcelona. Lucky ShoZu is pre-loaded across the new Samsung range so nobody complained :-)
Some of the features of the new Samsung lineup:
I can blog from my phone?? No way!
At the show we also announced our partnership with
Ubiquisys which is an awesome femtocell technology that gives any old phone broadband speed! They were demoing how quickly ShoZu could upload 5 megapixel images and high quality video over their network without draining the phone's battery like other technologies can. Pretty sweet display!
Just when you thought the show was over, we rushed across to Pepcom which is best described as a "mobile speed dating" session where we all had a little demo table and were hounded one after the other by a couple of hundred press and analysts. Not much time to catch your breath but it's a lot of fun!
By far my favorite person at Pepcom was The Prosciutto Man who arrived with the biggest chunk of meat you've ever seen and carved it up right next to the ShoZu table!
And what's the secret to working back to back 15 hour days while preserving that dainty spring in your step? Velvet clogs of course! Our VP Marketing, Jen Grenz, swears by them:
But I'd rather be wearing velvet clogs than donning the latest fashion from our CEO, Mark Bole. There's always one casualty when traveling, this time it was his beloved sunglasses which probably cost him the earth so he decided to keep wearing them anyway:
So that about rounds it up! As much fun as it was, it sure is good to be back from the crazyness. Stay tuned for more updates soon.
The ShoZu crew.
