Digitel Europe attends Mobile World Congress

Tuesday, March 7th, 2017 Back to press releases >

The Mobile World Congress is the largest Trade Show for the mobile industry. The event was held in Barcelona Spain, from 27th Feb to 2nd March 2017. It had more than 2,200 exhibitors and over 101,000 attendees from over 200 countries. The three delegates from Digitel Europe Ltd (below from left to right) were Ray Cullen, Sales Director, Tom Cullen, Managing Director and Danny Debrabander, Network Service Manager.

The conference is a global event, attended by leading Mobile Operators such as AT&T, Orange, Genband, Telefonica, Econet and Liberty Global, as well as top Infrastructure providers like IBM, Huawei, Kaspersky, NEC, VMware, Samsung and Nokia, and both Media and Internet companies such as Netflix, Turner and Vivendi to name but a few. Public policy organisations also have a strong presence at the event. This year they included the European Commission, Smart Dubai, the United States Federal Communications Commission and the United Nations.

This year's conference focussed on seven main topics:

• 5G and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)
• Connected World and the Internet of Things (IoT)
• Content and Media Creation and Delivery
• Emerging Technologies and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
• IoT Security and Consumer Safety
• Sustainable Development and Government/Public Policy
• Retail and Digital Commerce

Of particular interest to Digitel were the presentations on contextual communications, most notably the live support wrapper. This is being rolled out by Digitel on the Temovi Cloud platform, to provide companies with the capability to deliver real-time, interactive support through text chat, voice or video via an intuitive menu tree on a company website. The Application Program interface (API) that provides the functionality is accessed via a line of code in the website source code, and the menu system is built and managed through an intuitive web portal.

Another new product of interest was Accengage, a solution that provides push notification and engagement from mobile and desktop through websites, social media and mobile apps. Like Live Support, it is also managed through a simple web based portal and can be targeted based on mobile data such as language and location, profile data such as name, age, gender, address or workplace or behavioural data such as past internet history and purchases. It is also designed to integrate with external sources of data such as a Customer Relations Management system (CRM).

IBM's Watson Artificial Intelligence system proved fascinating, both in its applications for businesses, healthcare, statistical information processing, contact centres and first level service support, and the future possibilities of a system that delivers cognitive technology that thinks like a human. With the drive towards service optimisation and personalisation, the advantages of a service able to intelligently adapt to customer needs is obvious. We are currently looking at Watson's application with our Temovi business cloud.

As well as these cutting edge technologies, there was also a ‘blast from the past’ with the reintroduction to the market of the Nokia 3310 device. The 2017 update of one of the most popular mobiles of all time looked good in its new incarnation with a 2.4 inch full colour screen. There is definitely a place in the market for such a device, especially one with such a long battery life and a near indestructible build for a very modest price. Digitel will almost certainly be supplying these handsets to customers in the near future!

Also of interest was a Guinness World record attempt for the world's largest animated mobile phone mosaic by consumer electronics brand Vestel. It employed 504 Vestel Venus phone handsets in a 12 by 42 array, giving a total area of 7.44 square metres. Each handset was HD (1280 by 720 pixels) giving an aggregate resolution of 15,360 by 30,240 pixels.

This beat the previous record, set in Beijing by mobile handset manufacturer HTC in July of 2013. It used 400 HTC One handsets to play a minute long looping video. The new record was officially recognised by representatives from the Guinness Book of World records and a presentation was made in front of the mosaic on the second day of the event.