3GSM in Barcelona (yes it is that time of the year)
Barcelona has literally been invaded by 60,000 people attending the 3GSM conference. Needless to say that if you put that together with Valentine's Day tonight it will be absolutely impossible to eat in a restaurant in Barcelona.
Overall, except from hotel fully booked and big chauffeur-driven cars the only real impact of 3GSM on the city is this weird constant presence of business people everywhere.
Those of you who've been here may have noticed that you can see a bit of any urban tribe known to humanity (from proper from lads from Leeds on a stag weekend all the way to hardcore catalanist environmentalists- don't ask me who they are). Right now the business people on business trip tribe are definitely a majority. You can recognise them in 3 easy steps: they always wear their conference pass, they only wear black suits and they have really cool mobiles (but they still manage to get lost looking for that authentic restaurant).
At the time of writing this post I haven't seen anything new or really exciting. Nokia integrating youtube? So what? Shouldn't you be able to access and view any youtube clip with any decent mobile? Sometimes I struggle to understand whether I am being too cynical or whether new technologies are always put on hold in order to figure out how to charge users first.
Unfortunately the only company I'd really like to see demo their new products is not here. Apple can actually take the luxury of not showing up at this kind of events and only run their own shows.
Anyway, that's all from Barcelona, capital of mobile communication, (but just for a couple of days).
Ciao
