Futurity Media have spent the first half of the week soaking up the wealth of material coming out of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Anthony & Stewart have been working from the Fira Montjuïc with a team of professional bloggers, monitoring the very latest developments from the show on behalf of the Orange Live blog. Here’s a snippet of some of their postings on http://live.orange.com/category/high_tech/conference/mwc2012/:

Road test: using LTE mobile broadband for blogging at #MWC

From a radio perspective, Mobile World Congress is one to the noisiest places on earth. Almost every stand has Wi-Fi, causing huge interference problems to the extent that visitors are more likely to get good connectivity with their 3G mobile broadband. We were very lucky to get the opportunity to try out 4G, the next iteration of mobile broadband. Alcatel-Lucent peppered the Fira with LTE macro and metrocells. They brought along 200 LTE Android handsets, tablets and Mi-Fi devices for key executives and bloggers to try out. The Orange blogger team were among them.

Check out the performance in the words of Stewart: http://live.orange.com/road-test-using-lte-mobile-broadband-for-blogging-at-mwc/

welcome to the mobile shopping revolution

Mobile technology is revolutionizing consumer behavior during shopping and the next few years will see ever more radical changes to the shopping experience. This is what the speakers at a keynote at Mobile World Congress from the different worlds of retail, ecommerce and advertising believe. Mobility will drive more changes in the retail and payments in the next five years than we have seen in the last 20. This remarkable claim comes from John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, which through its ecommerce site and associated payment company PayPal has already done more than most companies to revolutionize our retail experience.

Find out more from Anthony: http://live.orange.com/welcome-to-the-mobile-shopping-revolution/

your phone is a game console, tablet and a laptop #MWC12

Stewart explains how when he blogs, he has an array of devices – each with a different function. The laptop has the all-round functionality, the tablet the portability and the handset has the pocketability.

Find out more: http://live.orange.com/your-phone-is-a-game-console-tablet-and-a-laptop-mwc12/

Anthony & Stewart were part of a top blogging team for Orange:  http://live.orange.com/top-blogging-team-at-mobile-world-congress-for-live-orange-blog/

For full MWC coverage – including all the press events & keynote speeches, please see: http://live.orange.com/category/high_tech/conference/mwc2012

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Meanwhile, back in London, Joe has been working on ensuring that Orange Enterprising Business Blog – (http://blogs.orange-business.com/enterprising-business/) readers also got a daily dose of MWC information and what it could mean for them. Here are some extracts:

device management shines in Barcelona for BYOD-focused enterprises

Device management appeared to be making a big noise on the opening day of Mobile World Congress. As the likes of Nokia, LG, HTC and Sony unveiled their new smartphones, enterprises were carefully watching SAP and Symantec who unveiled upgraded mobility strategies.

According to Symantec’s State of Mobility Survey – released at the Congress – 67% of enterprises are concerned with malware attacks spreading from mobile devices to internal networks and 65% cited data loss as one of their top concerns for mobile adoption.

Find out more here: http://blogs.orange-business.com/enterprising-business/2012/02/device-management-shines-in-barcelona-for-byod-focused-enterprises.html

will Facebook strike gold with a new community group?

Facebook is working with mobile operators to make phone-based payments easier and has launched an effort to standardize HTML5 to help developers write applications for more mobile handsets, its chief technology officer announced on Monday (27 February) at Mobile World Congress.

After the talk, Orange announced that it is working with Facebook and other industry leaders on initiatives to “create new and compelling mobile web applications and experiences for our customers”. The development could eventually help to make the mobile web become a fusion of the physical world and the digital world, changing the way consumers and enterprises engage with social media.

Find out more here: http://blogs.orange-business.com/enterprising-business/2012/02/will-facebook-strike-gold-with-a-new-community-group.html

NFC set to take over the world

Your mobile is your new wallet. That’s been a key message running for at least a year now, but adoption has still been crawling at a snail’s pace. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, it seems that the tech world and the financial world are looking to reawaken things. Will these announcements have an impact?

Arguably the biggest announcement in the world of Near Field Communications (NFC) is the newly formed strategic alliance between Intel and Visa.

Find out more here: http://blogs.orange-business.com/enterprising-business/2012/02/nfc-set-to-take-over-the-world.html

keeping the dream of upward mobility above

Eric Schmidt’s appearance at Mobile World Congress was arguably the most hotly anticipated session of the event. So what lessons has he offered for the enterprise community? In a speech focused on the future, he emphasised to the audience that “Developers are the builders of human freedom”.

Particularly talking about enterprises, he said that the benefits of technology to small businesses, was that it was “Keeping the dream of upward mobility above. [It’s] more than collective of machines, it is a collective of minds.” So how can you take the best out of these short motivational sentiments and apply them to your work?

Find out more here: http://blogs.orange-business.com/enterprising-business/2012/02/keeping-the-dream-of-upward-mobility-above.html

Our recruitment campaign has finished and we have hired a new writer at Futurity Media. We had some great applications both from social media and SourceThatJob, so thanks for all your efforts. Joe will be a valuable member of our team working across all of our clients and will be based in our Islington offices.

Joe Fernandez joins Futurity Media after a career in trade journalism working for publishers including TechTarget, Centaur Media, Reuters and E-Health Media. He was an editor looking after networking for Computer Weekly and Microscope magazines. He also worked as a deputy editor for Marketing Week’s sister title Pitch covering online marketing and social media developments and looking after the Telecoms & IT sectors, after a period writing for Marketing Week magazine.

He trained in IT journalism after graduating in 2006 with Reuters and headed up news coverage for E-Health Insider shortly after, uncovering key developments in the ill-fated National Programme for IT. Joe has also appeared in titles including New Media Age, Guardian Computing, Computing Magazine, The Inquirer and Mobile Magazine.

Joe can be reached at: joe <at> futuritymedia.com and on twitter @joe_m_fernandez