Do we bank on calling the future?

Some interesting threads, theories, predictions and predicaments emerged this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The crowd paying to get through the fabled MWC doors was pegged at around 95,000 - a little under the number Taylor Swift sang to during her recent Australia concerts.

Wow!

I wasn’t there for Taylor's Aussie touring leg or Spain’s annual mobile big one, but one story that caught my eye came from the lines in a keynote by Deutsche Telekcom CEO Tim H?ttges .

Using the conference to showcase a smartphone concept developed in collaboration with Qualcomm and Brain.ai that relies on AI instead of apps, Tim told the crowd:

“I can tell you that in 5-10 years from now, nobody from us will use apps anymore.”

Reuters ' Olivier S. has more on the presentation here: Deutsche Telekom showcases app-less AI smartphone concept.

Predictions are a funny thing. Seemingly real until overtaken by events. Seemingly unreal, until an event becomes reality.

Indeed, this year was only a few days in when London’s Evening Standard ran: People are claiming that Nostradamus’ predictions are coming true in 2024’.

Still, some circle out across their linked networks and decades later seem square on the money.

Back in 2013, Ginni Rometty singled out ‘big data’ as an event horizon that would define our global future.

Cloud data, mobile information and big bytes would get blended by predictive analysis in ways faster than any decision-making process to date, she predicted.

“IBM CEO Ginni Rometty crowns data as the globe’s next natural resource,” ran a Forbes headline to a feature by Robert Lenzner.

That was penned 20 years after games-to-global behemoth 英伟达 was founded.

In 2003, 10 years after NVIDIA was set up, Research in Motion joined the Nasdaq 100 as RIM and the company released its first BlackBerry with a colour screen.

Wow!

On the day after Tim’s keynote this week in Barcelona, The Economist wrote: “No other firm has benefitted from the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) as much as Nvidia.”

The thing is, European telecoms operators have a hill to climb.

They have plans for a way ahead. It's a big hill with long shadows, not helped by how what works and is supported in one region is not evenly available, distributed or regulated elsewhere.

From the #MWC conference coverage, it was noteworthy to see four lead executives of the sector sit together in a joint presentation calling for a new way ahead, a 'new deal' to grapple with what some have termed an ‘existential crisis’. Tim was joined by leads from Vodafone , Orange and Telefónica .

This call for a shift stems from that fact that while everyone wants to be digitally connected at home, in the office or on the move, the bulk of revenue and commercial upside from our 'always-on' lives goes to the likes of Alphabet Inc. , 亚马逊 , 苹果 , Meta , 微软 and Netflix .

More on this thread in a #goodread by Neal Doran at TelcoTitans – ‘Who the hell is giving these companies money? – H?ttges warns of investment crisis as big four unite.’

Staying with Tim and the app-less phone of the future.

Has he shared a product concept that will become the 'go-to', 'must-have' thing we live with in the decade ahead or is it part of broader play, presenting a narrative of vision and ambition? Seeing what holds and falls when you shake the tree.

Even if it is the latter, that is no bad thing. Aspiration is anchored to being somewhere higher, better. Somewhere tomorrow beyond today.

Still, amid the many lines of red-eyed journo copy flying out of MWC about how large language models could indeed take out the need for apps a bit like digital streaming did to the hard-case video store, Hannah Cowton-Barnes writing for Tech Advisor highlighted one use case that had me hitting the pause and consider button.

“Privacy is the biggest concern. Online banking apps have secure encryption, so you have peace of mind knowing that your data is safe. How would a phone without individual apps be able to do the same?” - ‘Why an app-less AI phone is a terrible idea.”

I expect that on the longer tail of Tim's prediction we will see more discussion and debate. That is a good thing.

Closer to home, I live in a place where I can listen to music digitally thanks largely to a line provided by a telco.

One night this week I took up an invite to go and see a band. They were tight, visceral, proud of their part in the 1980s UK music scene. They are still around, they have and give value. Their legacy is respected.

I bought some ‘merch’ and was given a ’45 gift. I was enriched, elevated, and happy. Rhythmic riffs ringing loud.

The problem is to paraphrase Tim … I can tell you ... I don’t have the kit to play vinyl anymore.

I put the ’45 in a box for now, alongside some Blackberry phones.