1st of 4 daily blogs from the 2008 MWC

Hello, and welcome to 3i’s MWC BLOG, bringing together some of the views of the team that help the entrepreneurs behind ScreenTonic, Bluelithium, Mobile365, UbiNetics, Magic4, DiBcom, CPS,  Sonim, CSR, Nordnav and many others. Find out more (PDF, 2MB)

Well, it was ‘Goodbye Cannes, Hello Barcelona’ and now its ‘Goodbye 3GSM, Bring on Mobile World Congress’. Reinvention due to concerns about their own future? Or ‘just lets get shot of the reference to ‘3G’’? SMStextnews has a nice summary

Whilst we’ve had a great year in wireless (congrats to the guys from ScreenTonic in their acquisition by Microsoft, Mobile365 by Sybase, Nordnav and CPS by CSR and Bluelithium by Yahoo! particularly), we’re working hard on the next thing. We’ve taken over the Catalonia Ramblas Hotel  with our portfolio of 30 or so companies attending MWC 08.

Welcome also to some of 3i’s Tech advisory partners – Yossi Vardi, Sachio Semmoto, David Nage, Hossein Eslambolchi, Giles Delfassy, Eric Benhamou and Ahmad Bahai,- they'll be around all week. If you want an intro, get in touch.

So, what we do think before the show?

What’s over hyped?
Mobile advertising – despite Eric Schmidt’s bullishness at Davos, we feel that, once again, MWC will call a market too early. Mobile advertising’s show time will be c. late 2009 - 2010. Key issue is STILL STILL STILL mass customers having a Wow experience of internet on their mobiles. This means aligning boring things like meaningful bandwidth (HSPDPA?), screensize and user interface. iPhone’s a major step, but its far from mass market.

What’s in the ‘trough of disillusionment’?
Mobile TV - ‘Darling of 3GSM 2007’ is still struggling. DVB-H has won the standards battle and chipsets are rolling, with our investment in DiBcom going like a train. But consumers are less convinced about paying. Do we see this changing in 2008? Nope.

Content players - Take Buongiorno! Will make c. $500m revenue this year, valued at $300m and profitable.

What’s unloved?
Helping operators outsource. Boring, but big. We’ve just backed Eltel 

Who to watch?
Mobile Search – check our new boy on the block Taptu 

Location, location, location - GPS chipset prices will fall dramatically in the next two years, and GPS will be in mass market phones. IS this finally LBS moment? Not for the consumer just yet, but 2008 will certainly be the dawn. Consumers want GPS, not mobile internet . Lets see what Nokia can show us after spending over $8bn on Navteq, Gate5, EnPocket etc.

Feel free to add your views and comments. If you want to get in touch with the 3i team, we’ll be at the Catalonia Ramblas hotel or contact me at mike.reid@3i.com

See you in Barcelona!