What a wild time I had last week.  I spent the week in Barcelona, Spain attending Mobile World Congress.  I met hundreds of people and gave out and received hundreds of business cards.

I also interviewed a handful of really interesting people.  I hope to write up all my interviews but in the mean time I’m going to post a short intro from my guests here so you can don’t have to wait forever.

This is Rafi Ton, the CEO of NewACT.  We’re talking about vufone their very exciting mobile app.

Here is Kerry Ritz of Palringo and one of the winners of TopMobile20. Congratulations Palringo.

This is Andrew Grill talking about Gigafone.

This is Veronica Livshits from DSPV.

This video is of Boaz Zilberman one of the founders of Fring

This is Oliver Starr who is the voice behind ShapeWriter.  Oliver swears this app speeds up his input into his touch handsets.

This is Nilo Garcia Manchado the CEO of econav a really interesting green tool

Here’s the Sonim “indestructible handset” according to my MIR Review buddies.

This is the Q1 from Blue Ant. For the sake of transparency they gave me a BT headset (not a Q1 unfortunately), thanks guys.

Being my second trip to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress I have a bit of advice.  If you or your company needs access to 3G or needs to make phone calls/sms, I suggest Yoigo.  I got my Yoigo sim last year at a store called OpenCor.  It is just a few hundred yards/meters from the entrance to MWC.  If you walk out of the congress and make a right on Gran Via it’s about 2 blocks up.  The address is Gran Via de les Corts 407-409 and it’s on the left side.  You will need ID to purchase the sims, I used my US drivers license.  One thing to note, MAKE SURE TO SET THE PREFERED LANGUAGE ON YOUR PHONE BEFORE YOU PUT IN THE YOIGO SIM.  Otherwise it will switch it to Spanish, I learned the hard way.

Anyways, I got mine last year for 10Euro and it came with 10Euro on it already.  I also added 10 more and was set for the entire week.  The rates as of last year, to the best of my understanding are as follows
1.20Euro/day gives you unlimited 3G
.12Euro to all Spanish numbers
.30Euro for all international calls
.00 for Yoigo to Yoigo calls
.10 SMS to anywhere including Spain
.30 MMS to anywhere including Spain

This seems like a very good deal to me at least.  Last year most of us had some call and 3G quality issues on the first day of MWC but after that it was fine.  It seemed like they had to catch up to the influx of all the new subscribers.

I highly recommend Yoigo.   If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

UPDATE: OpenCor along with MANY other establishments in Spain are closed on Sundays.  So don’t plan on picking up a sim or top up cards from them on Sunday.

GoMo News is again hosting one of their famous Blenders.  This one will take place Wednesday February 18 at BelChica in Barcelona, during Mobile World Congress. TopMobile20 will be holding the awards ceremony at the beginning of the GoMo party, so please make sure to stop by early and RSVP here.

Wow, it’ been a while that I’ve been using GrandCentral (one number to rule them all, by forwarding your calls to upto 5 US #rs at once) and I have always been quite happy with their service.  In the last few months though I have been getting perturbed that they don’t forward SMS/text messages to my mobile like they do voice calls. This is 2008 almost 2009, I can’t believe it’s to difficult for a Google owned company to receive 140 characters and turn around and forward those same 140 characters to a mobile phone.  Honestly I would even be content if GC would forward a text to my email address.  I use my GrandCentral number for business and most people just assume it’s a mobile number.  Problem is, some people in turn will text my GC number and guess who never receives a text message???  ME!  I had this exact situation happen to me while I was in Spain earlier this year.  A friend sent me an SMS and she never heard back from me so she figured I was just ignoring her.

GrandCentral, fix this problem now and if you only have a band aid of emailing me the SMS that’s fine.  I want that as an option when you do bring out the full service anyway.  For now I just want to be able to receive SMS anyway possible.  Make it happen.

We can talk about sending SMS from our GC #rs in the future.

I met Frank Hannigan the CEO of Yougetitback.com back in Spain during Mobile World Congress and again when they so kindly sponsored Mobile Geeks of Las Vegas a few months back at CTIA in Las Vegas. I have been talking about his product ever since to anybody I can. Mobile Super Hero from Yougetitback.com is the wonder app if you lose your mobile phone. As far as I can remember, you can use your indevice GPS to locate your phone with another compatable phone. You know, like when you drink a wee bit to much at the bar and leave it there.

You can also activate the service if it’s stolen and it will lock your device and when the crook tries to make a call they get a message saying their picture has been taken with the forward facing camera and sent to the police. At that point that’s when the GPS becomes useful again so you can go pick it up from the floor where they dropped it as they run away.

Another nice feature is if you lose your device and it doesn’t have GPS, so it might just be gone forever you Yougetitback.com can back up your contacts so you will be able to reload your new phone with your names and numbers.

I can’t tell you how pleasant and inspired Frank is to hang around. We had a few drinks together and I was instantly convinced I need this service. I will be downloading it as soon as I’m done editing this post.

Thanks Frank, let’s chat soon and good luck with Yougetitback.com.

I have been traveling since I was 3 months old and have done a great deal of travel for business in my life. I have used, Expedia, Travelocity, Cheap Tickets, and Kayak, to book flights but I keep getting drawn back to a real human travel agent. I have had my fare share of agents over the years and like the idea that there’s someone available to me to help me out in a jam.

I have been told while sitting on an airplane that I would not make my connecting flight and that as soon as I can get off to go stand in line to be rebooked. I have no affinity to lines so what do I do? I whip out my trusty Nokia mobile phone and call my travel agent back home while sitting in my seat still on the airplane and tell them what’s happened. I am on hold for a few minutes and then get told it’s all taken care of. They tell me I’m rebooked and give me the gate I’m supposed to go to next, my travel agent even sends me an email so I don’t have to write any of the info down (I’m a bit forgetful).

Now this is just one of the many reasons I still like using a travel agent. I recently flew to Barcelona, Spain for Mobile World Congress on very short notice. I didn’t have a hotel room for my first night and all but 5 hotel rooms were booked up in the entire city. Well when I landed I got on my email and found that as requested my travel agent sent me the names and numbers of the hotels that still had vacancy. None of the online travel websites will do that for you.

Of late I haven’t even found much of a difference in the pricing of tickets purchased via a travel agent versus an online site like Expedia. I am such a believer in travel agents that I gave my current travel agents number to my sister and she used them just this evening to book a round trip ticket to Argentina. She actually saved a few dollars by going with the agent.

Right now my travel agent company of choice is the Flight Centre located at the Block in Anaheim.
They have offices all over the world and I think they are headquartered in Australia.

Do you use a travel agent or on line bookings and why?

By the way, if I am not using a travel agent I generally just book directly with the airline I’m flying.

I have been using a Proporta for about 2 months now and I must say, these guys have a great product. I am using it rarely because I work in an office most of the time but when I do need it, it has been ridiculously useful. I used them first back in February in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress and have really liked them from day 1. The Proporta saved me a bunch of times in Spain (ridiculously bad Nokia N95 battery) and I recommend it highly for anyone who is away from a charger for more then a few hours.

There are 2 versions that I know of. There is a white slightly larger and more powerful one and a smaller slightly less powerful (fewer phone charges per wall charge) option. I have the larger white device and have very rarely had to charge it. The main difference besides number of charges our of each is that there is a power level indicator on the black version. I really wish the white option had this but it’s still a life saver.

Thanks Proporta for allowing me to review this.

By the way the Proporta I got came with a wall, car, and USB connection to charge the battery and the Proporta charger came with about a half dozen tips for different phones.

Hey go get a Proporta!!!

While I was in Barcelona I met more people then I could count. All of them were very nice but some of them stood out and above the others. Two of those wonderful people were from a company called I-Com Mobile their names are Keren Regev and Avi Polak. I know why we first met, Avi wanted to show me his amazing service I-Com Mobile, which is a service that when you take a picture with your camera phone this little program gives you the option to save it, send it or print it. Printing being my favorite option, you can print it on a bunch of different mediums like coffee mugs, t-shirts, or as a regular old fashion printed picture. One of the nice bonuses is that you can send the printed pic (on whatever you printed it on) to anyone around the world via snail mail. That means that you can take a picture of your kids and print it on a coffee mug and have it sent to your parents. You can even add text to it. This is such a fantastic service because you won’t lose that great picture in the mess of other pictures on your phone that will never be seen again. It really is in my opinion a great value added service that’s worth paying for. Now Avi and Keren were great, because after the business of the day was all over with we still hung out. I even went back to their apartment in Barcelona were they fed me and we hung out even more. They were great to meet and wonderful people to know. Thanks Avi and Keren and I hope to see you in Las Vegas at CTIA.

SpeedBit blows my mind. It makes it possible to upload and download at 3 to 5 times faster then you would normally be able to on your computer and soon on your mobile phone. This will save a great deal of time and make it possible to watch video without the hiccups. Also transfering large files will become much quicker. Ariel broke some exciting news to us in the second video. Besides the many many video sites that SpeedBit already supports with their hispeed downloads they are announcing to us that they will now support Netflix and iTunes videos. This is truly amazing and a step in the right direction.

Announcement

Nortcon is probably one of the top 2 or 3 companies I met in Barcelona. The service they provide is so simple, I can just drop an HTML link in next to a video on the net and by clicking on the link it will give the user the ability to send the video to their phone and watch it there. I can’t tell you how cool this is. I mentioned it to a group of bloggers and they went wild. This means that any video can be viewed on a mobile phone with almost no effort. All I can say is WOW.