BARCELONA -Mobile 2.0 Europe has come and gone again this year, attracting once again some of the finest mobile minds and entrepreneurs to Barcelona.
The (now 2-day) European showcase of mobile startups and trends in mobile this year gave everyone some extra food for thought with Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability and Regine Debatty on Mobile Culture.
Tom gave a thought-provoking presentation on why most telcos are not doing enough about achieving sustainability (with some squirming in the front seat from Carlos Domingo of Telefonica but pleased faces from Vodafone, with Tom's thumbs-up of their corporate web policy on green issues).
Regine offered a visually pleasing interlude of examples of not-for-profit mobile art and culture, with examples of giant SMS mobile screen projections (SMS Guerilla Projector) on the backs of innocent pedestrians (check out www.we-make-money-not-art.com) .
The panel on 'Beyond Free' managed to top last year's after lunch panel (on the role of Mobile Operators in fostering innovation) in terms of provocative debate, fuelled by some diverging points of view between Inma Martinez (Moderator) and Ian Ginn (seasoned web/mobile entrepreneur).
The conclusion from the panel, if there was one, is that mobile startups are still seen as an (un)necessary evil by most VC's but are treated as misunderstood children because they don't fit in the VC's risk/return equations.
You can find all the links to the presentations on the official event site here. A big round of applause to Rudy,Carles and the rest of the Mobile 2.0 Committee for organising (and pulling off) yet another great mobile event in Barcelona.
I will post some of my videos of the presentations by Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless and Priya Prakash of Nokia, starting with this one below:
