Actual article date: Mar 9, 2013

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The Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona has ended a week ago and the team here has since landed home in sunny Singapore.

We had an awesome experience over there and thought that it will be great to share what we have observed.

As a first time attendees, the scale of MWC was pretty epic to us, nothing like we have ever seen before. 8 big halls of technologies and apps from various countries around the world with 70,000 attendees. This is not counting the numerous networking sites around the venue, as well as theatre venue in another huge hall.

It actually takes more than a day to go through all the exhibits, if you want to scrutinise everything. This includes having a huge bag to store the freebies that are basically shoved down your throat!

Now let us drop some opinions before diving into what we have been up to at MWC :)

The winner at MWC: Samsung

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Samsung was huge at MWC this year with probably the largest booth. And it paid off! There is a constant stream of attendees over 4 days at their booth to check out the new Galaxy 8 Tab as well as the many other gadgets.
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The most engaging pavilion: Nokia

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You could spend half the day at Nokia pavilion. They always have something up their sleeves, like a dance or some giveaways.
You could event check out the Makerbot Replicator 2 in action if you are a 3D enthusiast!

The most striking booth design: Firefox

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You could find their booth from a distance away. That’s how striking it is.

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The best small booth design: Masspay

‍ Initially I thought this was a real cafe and I walked in to actually order a coffee. Then it struck me that this retro cafe design is actually a booth! Nifty idea.

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University Mobile Challenge

Jublia was primarily at the MWC for the UMC, which is organised by the Applied Innovation and sees finalist from all over the globe. We were representing our home University under Jublia and were glad to make it through to the finals at MWC after a local round and a global round.

The competition at MWC was structured as such: a 5 minutes pitch, followed by a 5 minutes Q&A from the judges. One weird thing about the layout though, was that the judges were actually facing the audiences (instead of the presenter) during the pitch. A pretty awkward arrangement I’ll say.

Our pitch was definitely at the top of it’s class with Errol’s narration ability and I am glad that we showed that Singaporeans are always up for a good pitch!

While we did not win at the finals itself, it was fundamentally, still a good competition to join as we made a few good friends, including the guys at PumpUp over in Canada who are a pretty crazy bunch!

Most of the winners has apps that have been running for awhile now with customers and they definitely put up a more convincing pitch than us. We were however glad to do a “soft” launch at MWC itself and we have gotten some event organisers interested for upcoming events in the next few months and we are psyched to be able to work with them in enhancing the networking value at their events.

The next few months will definitely be an interesting journey for us. If you are an event organiser, let us know of your event and we will help you in powering up the networking potential!