By Will Goodbody, Science & Technology Correspondent in Barcelona
@willgoodbody
Your product or service may be new. It may be clever. It may even be unique.
But when you are a company competing on the global stage, in a massive market which changes second by second, getting people to take notice of you is not easy.
That’s the challenge facing the 50 or so Irish and Northern Irish companies taking part in Mobile World Congress this week.
Exhibiting at an event like this isn’t cheap, with the cost of a small booth alone costing tens of thousands. Add in flights and accommodation for the staff on that stand, and it can be a pretty big investment for those attending. So making it count is important.
In that context the Irish companies at MWC14, many of whom have taken space on Enterprise Ireland’s stand, have had a good week.
Brandtone used the occasion to launch its new online automated marketing platform, Konnect, and attracted the might of Unilever marketing executives to the launch to make it stand out.
Heystaks also launched the next phase of its business at MWC, which will see mobile operators offered an advertising platform based on what their clients intend to do and search for online.
Mobile payment business 3V used the event to highlight that it had just agreed a deal with Orange in Spain which will allow the operator provide a digital wallet to its 12 million subscribers, similar to the service 3V provides to O2 Ireland.
Also at MWC, Dublin based Asavie Technologies announced that Telenor Connexion, which is part of the Telenor Group, had signed up to use its machine to machine service, M2M Connect.
While telecom software provider Blueface used the platform of MWC to announce its launching a machine to machine service later this year, which will enable businesses to roll out applications for the wireless ‘Internet of Things’.
But perhaps even more important for the Irish companies at MWC is the future opportunities that may arise as a result of the connections they’ve made with other Irish and international companies they’ve met for the first time here.
Most of the attention at MWC may have been on the big manufacturers like Samsung, LG, Sony, Huawei and Nokia.
But from little acorns mighty oaks grow. And it’s clear that in Ireland’s mobile technology industry, we have plenty of promising acorns.