The Mobile World Congress has convened in Barcelona Spain and it looks like some of the news coming out could signal some upcoming laws for Internet Marketers.
If this year’s MWC could be summed up it may be something like “Looking through Windows to an army of Androids“.
The two main takeaways was first an impressive early demo of Windows Phone 7 which oddly just dropped the Windows Mobile branding as it did the Pocket PC before that.
Microsoft performed this nightclub trick of renaming something in hopes to draw more people before when they did so with their search engine as it went from MSN Search to Windows Live Search to Live Search before settling on Bing…for the time being.
More surprising was that Windows Phone 7 won’t be coming out until the end of the year so the obvious intention in its MWC debut was to keep developers focused on Microsoft’s mobile product than venturing off to the iPhone or Android.
Apple feels it doesn’t need a presence at the Mobile World Congress as it tries to keep the next evolution of the iPhone close to the vest for their own conference this Summer.
So Apple and others can simply watch as the 2nd takeaway from the MWC was the mass of Android devices being displayed and talked about, such as the:
- Acer beTouch E110
- Acer beTouch 400
- Alcatel OT-890
- Compaq Airlife 100
- Dell Mini 5
- Garmin-Asus Nuvifone N50
- HTC Desire/Bravo
- HTC Legend
- Huawei SmaKit S7
- Huawei U8100/T-Mobile Pulse Mini
- Huawei U8110/T-Mobile Pulse Mini
- Huawei U8300
- Huawei U8800
- Lumigon T1
- Lumigon S1
- Lumigon E1
- Motorola Quench/Click XT
- Samsung Beam/Halo i8520
- Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10
- Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini
- Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro
- ZTE – 5 unnamed Android phones
- Plus More
Combined with the recent ComScore data that there are 254 million mobile subscribers in the US with approximately a quarter of those being smartphones, it’s easy to see that Internet Marketing laws will be skewed toward mobile.
These laws will be influenced heavily by the advertisers which covet a market that is direct, personal, engaging, easy to track, and location aware.
The current means are of course within mobile search as well SMS advertising, mobile app sponsorship or in app display which are now advancing to mobile TV/video and mobile location aware social media/games.
How best to succeed in the mobile space will be talked about in several sessions at SMX West from such mobile experts as Greg Sterling, Cindy Krum, Matt Siltala, Rachel Pasqua, & myself.
Perhaps Steve Ballmer who is keynoting the conference will bring a Windows 7 phone to demo, but I will stick with the over 100 of Android phones being made available this year worldwide.
Michael Martin is the SEO Director at Resource Nation – based out of San Diego, California. In his 10+ years of Internet Marketing experience he has project managed & overseen the online marketing improvements to such sites for SC Johnson, IGN, Deepak Chopra, Trump Properties, Road Runner Sports, The Active Network and his own Google Android Mobile platform site GoogleAndBlog.com Michael Martin has recently spoken at SMX Advanced, SMX East, SES Chicago, Wordcamp LA, Affiliate Summit West & several PubCons.
