Mobile World Congress – A Showcase for ICS Clients

Mobile World Congress 2010: Young innovative Scottish technology companies supported by ICS have been given a unique opportunity to discuss potential business opportunities with global leaders in the mobile communications industry.

The meetings for our client companies were held during Mobile World Congress (MWC), the premier event for the mobile technology industry.

Eleven mobile technology businesses supported by our team who manage the national Wireless Innovation (WI) initiative participated in the SDI/WI delegation attending MWC staged in Barcelona (15-18 February).

The participating companies were: Premium Mobile Distribution Ltd; Rapid Mobile;
SFX Technologies; HSL Ltd; KeyPoint Technologies; Stream Communications; Steepest Ascent; Satsis; Tricastmedia; Ciqual; NX Vision.

Brief video interviews with each of the companies can be viewed on You Tube

Utilising our reputation in the industry the ICS Wireless Innovation team arranged for clients to meet with: RIM, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm Ventures, O2/Telefonica, OMTP, Samsung and Wavefront.

Stream Communications, a specialist in M2M (Machine to Machine) mobile network services, was also selected as one of three UK companies at WMC to meet Lord Davies, Minister of State for Trade, Investment and Small Business.

Nigel Chadwick, Stream’s Managing Director, said afterwards:”Barcelona was a fantastic event for Stream and the interview with Lord Davies really couldn't have gone any better. It was a great result for us and the Scottish technology business support infrastructure.”

Alisdair Gunn, our Senior Innovation Manager, who led the Wireless Innovation team, was in Barcelona and identifies seven major new trends in mobile communications technology as:

• Augmented Reality: an application on your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality through the camera of your mobile phone. A tourist could switch on the camera of their mobile phone hold it up to show the Glasgow Science Centre and the application would show details of the visitor attraction. The application can also be used in the retail sector.
• Mobile Cloud: personal data such as music and email will be stored in the cloud.
• Mobile Advertising: mobile apps will carry advertising providing developers with increased funds.
• Accelerated Development of Mobile Services: companies like Adobe, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and QT are opening up their software platforms to web and internet developers allowing them to mobilise their content at the touch of a button.
• Mobile Health: mobile and wireless are driving the development of mhealth solutions. An example is GE Healthcare’s mobile ultrasound scanner, Vscan, launched 17 Feb. Next year will see enormous growth in this area.
• Mobile Money: the financial services are moving into mobile market providing services facilitating simple purchases, handset banking, and money transfer. The potential for removing paper and cards will increase efficiencies for the financial services in what is being termed mcommerce 2.0.
• TV Entertainment: now available on the mobile platform an example being the STV player and the new User Interface (UI) platforms for Windows 7 provides multi screens to access broadcasts.