Numbers up, networking down

Fifty thousand people attended Europe’s annual mobilefest, 3GSM 2006, which ended on 16 February.

So says the GSM Association (GSMA), which organises the event, with its partner Informa.

As a result, the GSMA is viewing the event’s move to Barcelona as a success. It is billing the show the biggest mobile show on earth.

The event had been held in Cannes, France, for the last 12 years. In February 2005 it drew 34,000 visitors to the south of France. This year’s day one attendance at the show on 13 February was larger than last year’s figure for the whole show.

Exhibitor numbers were also up, with 962 companies exhibiting.

Cannes did not work hard enough to expand the exhibition facilities available or to improve service from hotels and taxis.

But in many ways the show has lost something. It used to be very democratic, in that wherever you went in Cannes day or night, you would meet people at the show and get to know them in an informal setting.

Now many of the events are off site, which means they tend to be by invitation only. This must make it much harder for the smaller companies to accidentally meet important high-level contacts, just because they are in the same bar.

The logistics have also been a bit of a nightmare with little information on where off-site hotels and other venues are.

Taxis can be hard to find and taxi queues outside the exhibition centre were often 100 yards long – or longer.

There were also queues for the ladies loos and journey times were unpredictable because of heavy traffic.

This meant much of the time that could have been spent networking was spent in cabs. For press, the facilities were appalling. PCs - or Ethernet connections for people prepared to lug laptops around a large show - were enough for about 10% of the 1,400 journalists expected to attend.

In the end 1,900 turned up. Many found that when trying to connect to their internet email to check a venue address or meeting time, they could not even get on to a PC. Because they were all taken.

A surprisingly high number of delegates also reported thefts of bags, mobile devices or laptops from meeting rooms.

As last year – the press office closed at the unfashionably early time of 4pm. No wonder the GSM Association is taking more control of the event from UK-listed Informa.

In a new three year contract between the GSM Association and Informa, the GSMA will handle more of the sales and marketing of exhibition stands and increase its role in organising the keynote and other speeches.

Highlights

For me the highlights of the show, were the Motorola press conference and a Women in telecoms breakfast organized by Margaret Rice-Jones, a senior manager at the same company.

Nokia was also upbeat about the future and Jorma Ollila, the company’s CEO, seemed in high spirits at the company’s press conference and genuinely touched to receive the chairman’s award at the Hollywood-style GSM Awards.

This contrasted with a rather brusque acceptance speech from Vodafone when winning one of the awards.