As promised from yesterday, I continue to bring you the latest news from the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona.
Yesterday, even though it was the beginning of the conference; and I couldn’t get much information, it was released today that the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has plans on providing basic internet services for free to people. Today, Mark had some updates and plans along with some of the challenges he is facing. Mark had this to say:
“We’re really serious about this, we have these services that people love and are drivers of data usage and people want to use and want to get onto the internet to use them, and we want to work this out so it is a profitable model for our partners.”
Mark then presented the fact that if people don’t go “Bandwidth hungry” and spend all their time on YouTube and other services that require a lot of internet, that they should be fine.
Along with the news from Facebook. Google’s SVP explains how he is deciding to connect the unconnected. Sundar Pichai states that Google is working on a new project called Project Loon.
“Project Loon was just an unimaginable idea where we would release balloons into the air and use them as cell towers. We had launched this experiment about 2 years ago…. We were able to get the balloon to stay in the air for 5 days, providing 3G to us on the ground. But we knew that we would have to keep them in the air for at least 3 months for this to work. Today we are happy to announce that we are able to keep our balloons in the air for as long as 6 months- 200 days -and instead of just 3G speeds we are progressing to provide LTE speeds directly to mobile handsets on the ground." - Says Sundar
Monday morning’s agenda saw some familiar subjects being discussed. Including, but not limited to; regulations and net neutrality. It was brought to attention by one speaker that she believes that digital identity is the new frontier. Which means we think we need a better access point to access our social media, payments, and keeping updated in the world. People want to access them and to show who we are but not sure if they want to give out their emails and phones numbers and be spammed after that. In the year to come you can expect to see new developments to become more balanced so you don’t have to worry about all of that anymore.
In the big news of the day, Sony stressed its commitment to the mobile market while revealing their new smartphones. Meanwhile Microsoft introduced two new Affordable smartphones. Sony introduces the Xperia m4 Aqua for which they created a whole new classification of smartphone, and they are hoping to redefine what customers can expect within this price range, and as the name suggests - yes the phone is waterproof.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has introduced the new Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL.
That wraps it up for today’s conference, stay tuned tomorrow for day 3 of the MWC with more exciting things to come to the mobile world.
