A Week in Barcelona

[Commentary] The Mobile World Congress convened in Barcelona, Spain, this week. The agenda-setting event is where wireless network operators, cellphone manufacturers, content providers, advertising gurus, and Internet players gather to assess the nearly $2 trillion wireless industry. Although we like the shiny new devices launched at the event as much as anyone, we’ll focus instead on trends in the business and the changes sought in regulation of the industry.

We noted a bit of defensiveness as event kicked-off. You might find the defensiveness surprising. Here in the US, 88% of US adults are now cell phone owners and a total of 46% of all American adults are smartphone users. But most companies, the Wall Street Journal reported, would be looking to explain in Barcelona one of two things -- "why they haven't done as well as they thought, or what they will be doing differently in order to do better," said Neil Mawston, a telecom analyst at Strategy Analytics. So there was a lot of talk about revenue-building strategies, financial services in a mobile world, and how to capture more of the connected consumer's time and money.