The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona – why ediscovery vendors are here

28 February 2012 – In Barcelona, the digital onslaught has begun.  Mobile World Congress 2012 opened yesterday.  To give you an idea of the size, it runs for 4 full days and this year some 60,000+ people are registered to attend.

It’s our third year in a row here and we have a ball.  So far the talk of the town is NOT digital.  It’s transit.  At the last minute the threatened dispute, which would have shut down the metro network, was called off.  And if you know the layout of the city you know that the hotels are spread out and most folks take the metro and not taxis.  But in all fairness, Microsoft and Nokia put on a nice presentation yesterday on their new phones and OS.

We normally attend via our digital/intellectual property sister company EAM Capital Partners because all of their telecom clients are here.  But this year we are also attending with our sister media company, as Project Counsel Media.   There are a lot of legal vendors and law firms attending the Congress and we are working with MWC to add an e-discovery component next year.

E-discovery vendors are here already.  Not presenting but attending.  Last year we encountered 3.  This year at least 12+.  Last year was rather cool because we had an off-the-floor presentation of how an ediscovery/forensics expert breaks out a mobile phone and extracts the data.  We hope to see more “lessons” this year.

All in all, this event is about revenue-building strategies for mobile-phone operators, financial services in a mobile world and how to capture more of the connected consumer’s time and money, convergence and the battle for dominance across a range of other telecoms-sector-related channels from smartphone operating systems.  We’ll be reporting on that post-conference on our EAM Capital Partners site.  That will include some chats with IBM and Symantec, two of the vendors here with substantial e-discovery assets and some pretty big staffs here at the show.

And the big gorilla not in the room is Apple (who just announced their new iPad presentation date).    The  smartphone and tablet poster child will stay the course with its tradition of eschewing the trade-show circuit and not make an appearance in Barcelona.

But it leads us to a point we made in our extensive LegalTech 2012 review (click here) and why so many e-discovery vendors are here:

 “Mobile First”.   At LegalTech this year we saw two e-discovery data processing/data review presentations on iPads.  The future.  One of the technology trends that can no longer be ignored is the rise of the Apple platform across all enterprises, a trend I wrote about in January (click here). In one of the conference sessions at this year’s LegalTech, the sentiment from the floor was that the Apple iPad was now the device of choice for attorneys.  And we encountered e-discovery vendors who have developed a niche product line dealing with data collections from Apple products.

No surprise.  It’s a “mobile first” world.  As the folks from Forrester said at their presentation “companies need to realize that mobility is the new front end for engagement systems. Apps are increasingly context aware, fed by the cloud, sensors, history and social data. That requires companies to reconsider how they deploy apps for customers, partners … but especially employees around this enhanced form of engagement”.  Bravo.  Mobile apps from companies can’t just log data, they need to harness all the power of mobile and social to help people get specific jobs done in any particular industry. 

And so it will be for e-discovery applications based on the “industrial strength” presentations we saw.  All you need to see is Microsoft’s purchase of Skype, Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility and Deloitte’s acquisiton of Ubermind to realize that technology’s next phase will be those firms that boast the most compelling ecosystems of devices and cloud-based services.  And it also explains why e-discovery vendors last year attended the Mobile World Congress and learn more about technolgy, platforms and “industrial strenth” apps.

Apple has had something of a head start in this race thanks to the visionary Mr Jobs, and they are clearly winning hearts and minds in the enterprise, but Amazon, Google and a host of other companies are now hard on its heels.

But this marvelous convergence of diverse technologies and applications and the “what is possible” makes attendance at events like the Mobile World Congress mandatory.