HOW NOT TO DO A BIG TIME CONVENTION!

The tragedy of big meetings is that they focus on big things as talking points and too often the very small but important innovations or ideas get ignored.

Take my advice, if you ever attend the Mobile World Congress or any other major industry or international get together, narrow down your purpose to one or two things that you want to learn more about and home in on those for the rest of your time there.

Running around the 8 humongous halls that housed all the major brand names in the world of Mobile Technology and Computing as well as hundreds of others you´ve never heard of, I realized you cannot take in the whole enchilada so to speak as far as things conventions are concerned not even when you are running a team of 10 battle hardened scribes with years of doing this behind them.

I started with wanting to attend all the major announcements headlined by the likes of Microsoft, Vodafone, the GSMA, Research In Motion et cetera et cetera while at the same time hoping to visit the stands of all the mobile payments innovators as well as the stands of all the country galleries where nations were showcasing some of the industries they´ve incubated in their own little Silicon Valleys and hoping to attract more innovators and venture capitalists while at it and so on and so forth.

BY the end of it, I realized I had achieved very little. I had seen a lot without forming any major themes that I could tell others about, only disjointed bits of this and that and half-beginnings of that idea etc.

Now that the event is over, I realize I did not get around to one of the most important topics that is going to become relevant for media in days to come - Mobile Advertising!

While there were many showcasings of mobile advertising solutions, the advertising companies are yet to migrate their dollars from the traditional media to mobile even as the latter is hyped as the current and future big thing.

I have some write ups from PR guys but given anotha opportunity, I would have dissected the convention with the sober precision of a surgeon not the brute passion of a butcher....