Highlights of the Mobile World Congress

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What stood out at the 2010 congress?

HILTON TARRANT: Angus Robinson, CEO of Brandsh, joins us in the studio now. Angus, you had the opportunity to attend Mobile World

Congress 2010 in Barcelona, 49 000 people attending that mobile industry conference in Barcelona last week, nearly 2 500 members of the media. In terms of what you saw across the four days, what was the one highlight that stood out above everything else?

ANGUS ROBINSON: Hilton, I think Google and their announcement of their Mobile First mantra is certainly something that will stand out. So that, coupled with the announcement of Windows Mobile 7 really puts the two megabrands in the Internet space right up there again. Google has been fairly slow in coming into the mobile space, so I think that the two of them are really going to up the game for all the operating systems, and at development world.

HILTON TARRANT: That's all very well on the kind of top-end smart phone side of things. Were there any other trends that you saw? I know there was a lot of talk around mobile money transfer services for emerging markets.

ANGUS ROBINSON: Well, those mobile money transfer services have been here at MWC for the last couple of years, and I think it is certainly something that is always there or thereabouts. Lots of brands are trying to get into the space, operators are also trying to make sure that they are relevant in that pace. Lots of talk about M-PESA, which is Safaricom's brand in Kenya that is being spread throughout Africa, so that was very much up there. But also think around money transfer - I think that one of the things that Eric Schmidt from Google said was that the phone is the correct credit card, and I think that the money transfer market is really going to hot up now that you have the big brands behind it. And now the operators are also taking it seriously. So ja, with all the focus on high-end phones, I think that the sort of emerging market does get left behind. So it's not just about money transfer. We also saw a number of different applications really behind the social change and trying to make a difference to people's lives, which I think is quite interesting.

HILTON TARRANT: With all these trends, what does it mean necessarily for a market like South Africa?

ANGUS ROBINSON: Erm, well, I think from what I saw this year and last year as well, I think that having access to communication as well as access to information is one of the quickest ways of breaking the poverty cycle. So applications like BobAJob and something in Brazil called Rede Jovem are two applications that really help people with very low-end phones, very basic needs, to get access to information, allowing them to get their first job or a job that is close to them. And those are the kind of applications that are going to make sense of location-based services in this country.
There's a lot of hype around mapping and location-based services, but we really need to see what the vast majority of this country needs, and 20m people might just need access to something fairly basic. The 75 000 iPhones in the country aren't going to make a difference to that mass market in this country.

HILTON TARRANT: Angus Robinson is founder & CEO of Brandsh Media.