“The new rule. Mobile First” – Eric Schmidt – Google CEO

This week the great and the good in mobile gathered in Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC). And as well as all the operators and the handset manufacturers the big names from the Web were there – reflecting just how important mobile is now. We’d recommend taking some time to read our coverage and watch the presentations – these companies are making very big bets on mobile and we believe that those brands that are equally forward thinking can gain real competitive advantage. Wouldn’t we all have approached digital more aggressively in the 90s had we known just how important it would become? Morgan Stanley believe that mobile will be 10 times bigger than the PC web…

The Google session was really interesting – as well as this new rule “Mobile First” Eric Schmidt was very keen to position Google as a positive force in mobile – despite earlier comments from Vodafone about them being too powerful. He also demonstrated Google Goggles and pointedly made reference to how well Flash runs on Android.

More information here – plus a link to the video of the presentation

But Google wasn’t the only game in town. Microsoft chose MWC over the recent Consumer Electronics Show to launch Windows Mobile 7. First reports say it’s really good – which it needs to be if Microsoft are to regain their once powerful position mobile. Some thoughts on the sheer scale of mobile and on Microsoft here.

And Facebook gave a really important presentation about how they are embracing mobile – and how they think it can help them get billions of users. There is a video of their presentation here – well worth watching.

The rest of MWC was a little subdued – few new devices apart from some really nice handsets from HTC  and the new technology that everyone was talking about is LTE or Long Term Evolution – the technology that will drive 4G . But despite the huge increases in data driving capacity problems for the 3g networks, there is view operators may look for cheaper interim fixes. Interestingly Eric Schmidt said he expected operators to introduce some form of tiered pricing for mobile data.

We’ve summarised our thoughts on MWC here and this is worth a read too.

More ipad demos
Outside of Barcelona there is still plenty going on – this video demo of how Wired expects to use the ipad shows how magazines are going to be researchnted by tablets.

Mobile and financial services
Some new reseach underlines how important mobile is for US financial services brands – and news of recent initiatives by Nationwide and NatWest show similar trends in the UK

US Mobile commerce to reach $2.4bn – this year
The apps from Amazon and eBay have helped drive mobile commerce and this new research suggests rapid growth.