Mobile World Congress Chatter: CEOs on Mobile Data

Barcelona hosts the Mobile World Congress  this week and the masters of the digital universe, from Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to Google CEO Eric Schmidt,  weighed in on the future of mobile. The consensus has been that mobile data and content- ranging from video to ad formats to the need to develop better analytics- are the hot topics of the day. Mobile data usage will continue to explode, with operators, platforms and brands scrambling to manage costs and ROI.

 

“When you consider the amount of investment needed – and it’s dramatic and stretches across timelines from five to ten years – we need a predictable regulatory environment with a light touch. That will be critical to driving all this, as well as openness across the ecosystem.”–  AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson at MWC Q&A per Telecom Asia

 

“Content is going digital, but it’s about context. Make sure everything that gets served up is relevant, especially as screens get smaller. Noisy internet is old.” –  Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, during a Q&A panel per V3

 

“I feel very, very strongly that we depend on the successful businesses of the operators globally, and I disagree with that quote ‘we’re trying to turn the operators into a dumb pipe.’ The only specific issue we have is that we don’t want operators to choose between different vendors of the same kind of content.”Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his keynote address  Appscout

 

We need to re-invent ourselves to support the operators in building the networked society – this will be their greatest opportunity.”Ericsson CEO Hans Vesterberg per Gadget

Learn more aout the conference here

More in Media

How Lipton is using local creators instead of building in-house social teams 

Lipton worked with Billion Dollar Boy to activate local creators across six different markets; a new approach to global marketing

How a German publisher JV is turning LLM visibility into a premium brand buy

Germany’s BCN, the joint-venture commercial arm of three major publishing houses – Hubert Burda Media, Funke and Klambt – is rolling out a commercial product that helps brands get properly surfaced and described inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants, not just on traditional search results pages.

AI podcast experiments march on with Forbes’ new daily audio briefing

Forbes bets on AI-generated audio with a five-minute daily news brief. Stories are selected by product, editorial and an internal AI tool.