Mobile World Congress 2017 Highlights

We were excited to land in Barcelona to pay a visit to one of the biggest annually held events in the mobile industry, the Mobile World Congress, organized by the GSM Association.

The event is getting bigger every year, having moved to the modern and more spacious part of Barcelona’s Fira complex, Gran Via, in 2013. With more than 100000 attendees from 200 countries in 2016, we were looking forward to this year’s edition, to see all the new announcements, catch up with existing partners and meet exciting people from all around the world. The format of the blog does not allow to describe in full all the exciting expositions and products that we ran into during our two days in the Catalan capital, but here are a few items that caught our eye.

PEPPER ROBOTS

The Japanese giant Softbank, together with Aldebaran Robotics of France, presented Pepper, a talking and “understanding” robot. Yes, you got it right – Pepper is the first robot in the world that can recognize and interpret principal human emotions. In addition to that, Pepper is kind of big on gestures himself, adding a natural tint to the whole conversation. Impressive, Softbank! Meet Pepper!

DRONE FIGHTS

Finally someone found some good use for all this drones that we kept seeing flying all over Gran Via. The Slovakian start up, Drone n’Base, produced the first gaming drone which lets drones pit against each other and see the action streamed to a TV. Augmented reality is also in place, so racing and shooting look much more exciting than in your typical video game. The current game library is a bit limited at the moment, it would be great to see more stuff coming.

BOSCH TAKE AT THE CAR OF THE FUTURE

The Bosch concept of the future car is right there, no more driving wheel or physical knobs – everything is based on the touch and gesture control. Plus, there’s Bosch mySPIN technology which allows to stream your favorite apps from your smartphone right to that giant touchscreen. As you can see, that screen took over the century old driving wheel – dashboard combination. It’s also worth mentioning, that we’re proud to be one of the few companies already well versed with the development of mySPIN-based solution.

DRONES, DRONES AND DRONES

Drones certainly seem to be taking over the world! Almost in any of the 8 halls of the Gran Via we would encounter one, from smaller “fly-bees” to really advanced large machines with high degree of autonomy, just look at this beauty below, for example.

‘OUTRO’

We’d like to thank everyone we’ve met during these days for interesting conversations as well as endless supplies of coffee and cookies! And of course, the big “thank-you” goes to the gorgeous city of Barcelona, we were also pleasantly surprised by the event organization and how gracefully the city absorbed 100k additional people during the five days of the Congress. See you again in 2018!