GSMA – World Mobile Congress

I visited Barcelona for the biggest trade show in our industry. It was my first GSMA trade show and I learned lots of stuff about what to do and how to do business in a trade show.

Apart of all the interesting work being done in our booth, I also explored the trade show and played with the new toys. I really loved Samsung’s projectors integrated on the cell phones. I can’t wait to develop something using Nokia’s QT libraries and publish it using the new Nokia store.

I attended the Mobile Awards, where lots of start ups introduced interesting projects and crazy ideas on elevator pitches (3 minutes maximum). Seems like not enough time, right? In fact 3 minutes is enough time to decide if the project and the guy introducing the startup will success or not. Some of them even started their careers as showmans. I love to attend this kind of start up events because you can feel a lot of creative energy.

You can feel the vibe and see where the industry is headed for the next years.

How to speak so people will listen

Engineers use a language full of technical slang, buzzwords and acronyms that is only intelligible for other engineers or related web lifeforms. Sometimes we need to go out of our bubble and speak with regular people. Regular people is characterized because they don’t care how things work but how they can use them..

Only a handful of us are able to speak with regular people being respected as equals. Some are media whores, you can recognize them because they have thousands of followers on Twitter. There are some real scientists and engineers that enjoy explaining technical concepts but most of us suffer when we are speaking about technical stuff to people that lacks basic technical background.

Dilbert

Why do we need to speak with them?

You may need to explain your sales drones the magic that make your product different. It’s amazing that sales people know all the trendy buzzwords but they don’t have a clue of what they meant at a technical level.

You may need to explain your C-level people why your coders have been the last 3 months rewriting the entire architecture of the product without any visible improvement.

It’s clear that eventually you will need to speak with them.

The problems

There are three problems when discussing technology with regular people. The first one is that we can’t use our acronym based jargon but just plain language. The second problem is that we need to picture complex abstract concepts with something easy to understand. The third problem is the short attention span regular people have when listening technology.

There is no point in using acronyms the people doesn’t know about. There are lots of new ones created every day. For similar reasons you can’t use buzzwords, even the ones that have been forever on the web.

As everything is interconnected you may feel tempted to explain how something works explaining the related technology it’s based on. This is a double edge sword, people may understand you better but you will may need to explain the big bang theory and progress from there. By the time you reach your main topic everybody will be dreaming of donuts and you will be preaching in the desert.

The solution: Imagination land.

What you need to do is create a magic world where there aren’t acronyms and the technology is simple and accessible.

In this world, Internet works like the road system. Cars are Internet packets. Each car has a driver that knows their destination. There are two car brands, TCP and UDP. Both cars can go elsewhere on the Internet. They can even go off road to reach obscure destinations like this blog.

TCP cars are women’s favourites. Women always plan in advance their routes. They often get lost on the road but when they finally arrive at the destination the rest of the family is still waiting for them because they are only ones that know how to cook.

UDP cars are normally driven by males. Men don’t like planning. They get into the car and reach their destinations following traffic signals. Lots of drivers get lost but it doesn’t matter because nobody is really waiting for them at home.

On the other hand VPNs are intercity trains. There are already fixed established paths and you are not expected to go off road. Trains are streams of information. Train cars contain data, and on the locomotive is the driver, who knows where the train is headed and has the special key to open each train car.

A web server is a bakery where customers wait in line. Some years ago the bakeries had only a few cakes to choose but now all of the bakeries accept personalized orders. Behind the bakery there are big factories where lots of machines are cooking those cakes following personalized recipes. The factories are often interconnected so the product of one factory can be an ingredient on the next one. There are also giant storage places managed by third companies where all the ingredients (information) of the world is logically stored.

A firewall is the muscular guy at the entrance of popular spots. People in line are the network packets. If a network packet look suspicious the big guy will not let him in because he is not wearing today’s correct shoes. Once the disco is full the big guy act as traffic container and don’t let anybody to pass unless it’s a VoIP packet.

Spread the fun

Using this imaginary world make our world accessible to anybody. It’s easier and fun to explain, the people don’t lose their attention span, they don’t get lost under thousands of mysterious acronyms and they leave the room with an smile and a general picture of how things work.

If they are interested in the topic they will ask questions. That’s the moment in which you can switch to technical jargon language. You will saturate their attention span in minutes, they will get lost and they will not ask again. You ego will be intact.

Corporations can adapt to change. Nokia.

Three years ago I foresaw Nokia problems. They had no vision and they were producing lots of similar, crappy, unusable and confusing products. The only innovations they were introducing were bigger screens and camera integration with awful user interfaces. People accepted all those devices because they the best thing available even if they sucked badly. The technology was there to make something better but they just missed it.

When Apple introduced the IPhone it was clear where the market was headed. The future of the mobile computing was in simpler, better engineered devices with usability in mind, not features. The IPhone was what the people really wanted. Today, the Iphone, one single device has a big piece of the market and the most interesting thing is that it has never been marketed as a business tool but a cool personal device.

My prediction was totally on it’s way. Nokia was sleeping and dying slowly. Until now. The most interesting pitch I attended on the last GSMA was given by a Nokia VP in which he was introducing the Nokia Store, explaining why they bought symbian just to offer it to public domain, why they also bought Trolltech for the QT technology and their vision of the future mobile computing.

All of that means a 180 degrees turn on Nokia’s strategy. They have a new paradigm and they now embraces a more open way of develop software for their devices. Nokia is full of bright people and they will probably be heading again the innovation in our industry in a couple of years.

This change has tough me that even big corporations are flexible enough to be able to adapt to changes on time. Something similar is happening on Microsoft. They have been a lot of years ignoring and looking down on Open Source initiatives. Now we are in the middle of an economic storm and they are losing market share and the corporation is changing fast to a friendlier approach to Linux and open source.

The world changes, and the companies that are not willing to adapt dissapear.