Canadian companies head to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress

Canadians at the Mobile World Congress in Spain this week say the event has changed, with one major handset provider no longer participating, but the show helped shine a light on Canadian wireless advancements. “Barcelona definitely noticed us,” Vince Kadar, CEO of Ottawa-based mobile financial software provider Telepin Inc., said in an email interview. Held from Feb. 15 to 18 in Barcelona, the Mobile World Congress is the largest conference dedicated to wireless technologies, presenting hundreds of companies with the opportunity to meet, discuss business deals and demonstrate their latest offerings. Telepin was one of a number of Canadian companies that attended the event, some participating in the Canadian pavilion, organized by the federal, Alberta and Ontario governments, and some with their own booths. Also in attendance were Waterloo, Ont.’s BlackBerry Maker Research In Motion Ltd., Ottawa’s IT industry association the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI), Quebec City-based network test-gear maker EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc., and Toronto gesture-recognition technology developer GestureTek Inc. Canadians took the opportunity to announce new products and services at the event. Ottawa wireless software developer Bridgewater Systems Corp. announced that its EPC 500 control-plane system for LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) now has five major customers, including mobile operators in the Asia Pacific region, North America and South America. The EPC 500 provides subscriber and device-data management, and policy controls for EPC, which handles the connection between users and the main wireless network. “We had over 100 meetings at the Bridgewater booth over the past four days—the majority with customers and customer prospects,” Joanne Steinberg, Bridgewater’s director of marketing and communications, said by email. “This was the best show we’ve ever had.” Toronto’s IseeMedia Inc. launched a new value-added service platform for mobile network operators. Dubbed iseesocial, the software enables carriers to give users access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media systems from their handheld devices. “Canadian companies showed interesting technology and attracted lots of traffic,” Elie Makhoul, iSeeMedia’s chief technology officer, said in an email interview, referencing the partnership between Canada’s three largest wireless service providers in the OneAPI initiative, announced during the congress. Makhoul added that iSeeMedia didn’t have an exhibition spot this year, but he Canadian companies didn’t have the best location. “The position of the Canadian pavilion was not too obvious this year.” Smartphone players, including Google Inc., attracted significant attention. Google announced that 60,000 devices featuring its Android operating system are shipping each day. “Windows 7 is another major hit, although I don’t really see the major innovation,” Makhoul said of Microsoft Corp.’s latest mobile device operating system. “It’s rather a copy of the iPhone and Android.” The fact that Apple Inc. didn’t participate in the conference wasn’t a surprise, but Nokia’s absence was noticed, Telepin’s Kadar said. “Apple has their own event so it doesn’t require the fanfare of MWC . Nokia was notably noticed for not attending, however their presence in the market is still highly visible, with several vendors building applications clearly visible on Nokia devices at the event.” If there were any gaps as a result of Nokia’s and Apple’s absences, they weren’t overly apparent, Steinberg said. “We saw significant increased presence from Cisco with their recent acquisition of Starent,” she said. Cisco announced late last year that it would acquire Starent Networks, an IP mobile network infrastructure provider. “And Microsoft and Google were here in full force with their new devices and operating systems.” Kadar said that if Canada lacked anything, it was not in wireless. “It’s a shame we couldn’t incorporate elements of the Olympics into the event,” he said.

Canadian companies head to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress

News | 02/19/2010 9:57 pm EST

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