Optism™

The Optism team is back from Barcelona, the home of Mobile World Congress, and we’re brimming with excitement! Mobile advertising, mobile wallets and mobile commerce were some of the key “buzz” words at the show this year and the GSMA made sure that its conference programme was chock full of information on these topics.

It was great to see conference tracks devoted once again to Mobile Advertising and Mobile Money with the likes of Ogilvy Group, ESPN, Unilever, Adidas, Citigroup, and Mastercard all sharing their insights from everything to how mobile can boost a brand’s cross-platform strategy to using mobile to improve the overall retail shopping experience. The GSMA’s latest foray to entice more brands to come to the show was the mPowered Brands theater, which offered insights from comScore, Nielsen, Google, Verizon Wireless, Best Buy, Groupon and McCann World Group to name a few. There was also lots of news about Twitter and Facebook and their respective mobile strategies for brands. A great recap from Jeff Hasen, CMO of Hipcricket, can be found over at MobileGroove.

The Alcatel-Lucent booth in Hall 6 was bustling with people as our Optism experts were on hand to discuss the intersection of mobile marketing with mobile wallets and digital storefronts in a never seen before mobile commerce demo. Mobile carriers from across the globe were very enthusiastic about how we can optimize the mobile shopping experience for consumers while helping to better enhance their own value to advertisers, retailers and to digital media aggregators.  More to come on this topic so watch this space.

Finally, the Belle of the Ball this year was the lightRadio™ cube, a compact package with a powerful mobile broadband punch. It was being used at the show as Alcatel-Lucent partnered with Telefonica to deploy 11 of the tiny lightRadio metro cells across the Fira exhibition grounds in the first pilot of the technology. Additionally, Etisalat has completed a trial of the lightRadio in UAE and China Mobile signed a co-creation agreement to conduct joint development and test activities on a series of lightRadio projects. Finally, the icing on the cake came about when Alcatel-Lucent was presented with the GSMA award for Best Infrastructure Technology (lightRadio) and Light Reading described the technology as “the iPhone of infrastructure.”

Well that’s a wrap.

Let us know what knocked your socks off at Mobile World Congress this year. Leave us a comment or you can reach us on Twitter @Optism or join the conversation on our Facebook page.