Mobile World Congress is an unclear name. I don't know the intention of the creatives who chose it when they switched from 3GSM to MWC, but after attending, ever since it landed in Barcelona from Cannes in 2006, I think I have some clues. The translation you will see everywhere is Mobile Telephony Congress, which is totally wrong.
The mobile is a transitional device between electronic computers like the ENIAC of 1946 –167 m2 from the University of Pennsylvania, engineers worked inside– and the invisible computer or the Internet of Things. The mobile is not a phone: it is a computer. In fact, it is a computer that has more computational power than all the NASA computers combined that brought humanity to the Moon. Only 50 years have passed. The trend is for intelligence, computing capacity, and storage to break into a thousand pieces and spread throughout our environment in the form of sensors, actuators, clouds, and intelligent algorithms. When this happens, nothing will be a computer or everything will be a computer, and we will have to talk about the invisible computer, a planetary-scale computer. Therefore, and returning to the name of the congress, we should translate Mobile World Congress as Congress of the Mobile World (or of everything mobile).
Which brings me to talk about the essential things that, as the pilot said, "are invisible to the eyes." And this is particularly true in technology. Invisible technologies are those that have the power to transform people and societies, they are those that we only perceive when we don't have them. The new Maslow's pyramid of the first world underpins physiological, safety, and social needs, with Wi-Fi and electricity below. I don't have to explain how the need to plug in your mobile overrides all others if your battery is below 50% at noon. Engineers break their backs trying to run 5G over 4G networks and to define television standards for the next generation of 16K screens, but what changes our way of being is 4G and Netflix's 4K. A technology becomes socially relevant when it ceases to be so for technologists.
To the MWC you don't go to see products, you go to see people. Those people with whom you have been working all year, those with whom you have prepared a multimillion-dollar contract, those with whom you want to prepare next year's contract. Markets are people and this one even more so.Another invisible thing is human relationships. The MWC of 2018 is not like the Barcelona Motor Show, a city of fairs and congresses in 1965. Now there is the Internet; products, reviews, news, criticisms, analyses, and leaks are everywhere on the net. The most cutting-edge mobile, which was presented yesterday Sunday at the last minute, within a few minutes was already circulating on the net and this morning someone will have opened it piece by piece to see what it contains. At the MWC you don't go to see products, you go to see people. Those people with whom you have been working all year, those with whom you have prepared a multimillion-dollar contract, those with whom you want to prepare next year's contract. Markets are people and this one even more so.
And the last thing we won't see at the MWC are the thousands of trips that Catalan companies will make all over the world. That 120,000 professionals come to the city every year should make us all proud, but just as important for the future of the country are all the relationships that local companies and professionals make in just five days of congress; relationships that could only be established by traveling to the place of origin of the attending companies, an investment in time and money that is difficult for a company to assume. This is also not seen.
In addition to this, Samsung presents a mobile with more of everything – this year the headline is the camera – someone presents a mobile with less of everything – it only calls and has a battery that lasts a week – 5G continues to be the future and we debate about the opportunities and threats of artificial intelligence; a technology is neither good nor bad per se, but it is not neutral either. Special mention for the intelligent voice assistants that will make us talk a lot this year (pun intended). But all this you will see.
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