This week will be my 16th (and last) attendance at the Mobile World Congress as I say good-bye (sniff, sniff) to the conference/trade show circuit. I wanted to end my circuit here.
26 February 2024 (Barcelona, Spain) – – Every February my media team and I made the pilgrimage to Barcelona for MWC. Well, in 2020 it was cancelled due to COVID, and in 2021 it was in hybrid format and held in July. But the 4 of us trooped in to cover our favorite event – 3 of my regular staffers/video crew + one local staffer who I would use for the event.
But this year I am flying solo with no crew or camera, not so much to cover the event as a reporter but to be just an attendee, to soak up some info, and network with old friends. The person I will miss most is Silvia Di Prospero:
Silvia is my social media coordinator who has he task of running all of our social media accounts during each event we cover, and she would also clock/log all of my chats with vendors/attendees, matching cards/identity details to those chats – plus do the same matching for all of our video interviews. Many, many, many thanks Silvia. I know, I know – I don’t pay you enough.
The Congress is an event that has always covered all aspects of the technology fields I cover: artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, e-discovery, the complexity of network and mobile infrastructure and ecosystems, plus just about every facet of social media and content production. And this year (in fact for the last two years) Large Language Models and generative AI.
Of course, in the real world, knowledge is not separated into neatly defined boxes. Topics overlap and bleed into one another. All knowledge is interconnected. The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.
If you have only been to a legal technology event then you have not been to a real technology event. MWC is a bear to cover, hence I need a team of 4. The content available at MWC can be enormous. It makes your brain explode. This year’s event is down somewhat, about 105,000 attendees (down from the average 117,000+) but exhibitors (2,400+) and educational events/red team events (700+) are at full strength. If you include all of the exhibitor/vendor support staff and the event organiser support staff add in another 10,000.
And it is here you first see technology not yet in the mainstream. It was at MWC 2012 I first learned about the development of internet provision and data storage by networks of cubesats. You have undoubtdly read about these “swarm satellites”, as well as unauthorized rogue satellites. Many of these cubesats are roughly a tad larger then the size of Rubik’s cube and put in low earth orbit. Their launch caused issues because it threw a spanner in the works of national firewalls and other regional rules. If you can access the network and your data directly from any place on the globe it will be difficult (though not impossible) for governments to interfere. I had met with a cubesat OEM and a NASA scientist at MWC who described them in detail.
Anyway, onto MWC 2024 ….
Every year just before MWC, the American cloud software company Domo (which specializes in business intelligence tools and data visualization) publishes its highly anticipated infographic “Data Never Sleeps”. It has been keeping tabs on the world’s data usage – in a minute – for over a decade now. It issued its 11th edition (above) at the end of December and then tweaked it a bit last month.
The numbers consistently show that how we use data is always evolving – and that data isn’t slowing down. And it has noted some big changes. The rise of Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the way we communicate, work, and create. Digital payments continue to replace traditional transactions. Taylor Swift streams in countless headphones. And a rash of cybercrime grows alongside these digital experiences.
A pulse of our digital age, where every click, swipe, and stream fuels an ever-expanding digital universe. These are not just numbers; they are the heartbeat of a world where data reigns supreme.
Domo tracks the world’s data usage via 100+ data points, from Instagram to Twitter (ok, “X”) to Amazon to Venmo, and scores of others including data amalgamators like Statista. I think its a great “big-picture” glimpse into the immense volume of data generated on the internet every minute, showcasing how data is constantly evolving and changing as more people interact with digital platforms and services.
Regular readers know my mantra. Data and information services now sit within complex media ecologies, and networked platforms and infrastructures create complex interdependencies and path dependencies. The power dynamic has changed. Because data has become the crucial part of our infrastructure, enabling all commercial and social interactions. Rather than just tell us about the world, data acts in the world. Because data is both representation and infrastructure, sign and system.
It cannot be restricted, it cannot be regulated. As the brilliant media theorist Wendy Chun puts it, data “puts in place the world it discovers”.
We live in a massively intermediated, platform-based data environment, with endless network effects, commercial layers, inference data points, and new paths to analysis. MWC is a great place to explore it.