Yesterday I wrote my first post about MWC19 Barcelona. Today is the continuation of that. Part 2, or dos in Catalan, the local language in Barcelona. It's dos in Spanish too, but numbers in Catalan are mostly different: un, dos, tres, quatre, cinq, sis, set, vuit, nou, deu.

The reason that the conference became MWC rather than explicitly having "mobile" in the name is that connectivity is transitioning to a lot more than mobile. One area is automotive, and one of the keynote panels was on just that topic. Not so much autonomous driving itself, but what infrastructure will be required for cities with autonomous vehicles and partial ownership.

Then Simon Segars, CEO of Arm, talked a bit about a survey they have done on young people's view of the future, and then brought four young CEOs (age 9 and up) onto the stage for the youngest panel ever at MWC.

Daimler/BMW

One interesting session was Daimler/BMW. I am so used to seeing Daimler-Benz that it was only when the session started that I realized it was actually Daimler and BMW, long-time arch-rivals in the German luxury automotive market. As they were described in the introduction, it is like Ironman vs. Thor coming together in The Avengers.

Daimler and BMW have created four service customer-facing service companies and given them a big investment of over $1B, some of which has been used to acquire the leaders in the appropriate spaces in other countries than Germany.

As one of the panelists said later:

We are establishing a solid business. The hardware of our shareholders will probably have an important role, but we are tasked to be independent.

That's a roundabout way of saying that they will find a way to leverage BMW and Mercedes vehicles (which includes not just the obvious BMW and Mercedes, but also SMART and Mini). However, they have to be open. Their aim is to be the entry point for the services they provide for everyone.

The four panelists were:

• Jörg Reimann, CEO of Park Now and Charge Now (parking and charging infrastructure).
• Marc Berg, CEO of Free Now (ride-hailing).
• Daniela Gerd tom Markotten, CEO of Reach Now (yes, that really is a single person not, as I first thought, a woman and a man). But she couldn't make it and was replaced with Nass Parker (I may not have the name quite right)
• Olivier Repert, CEO of Share Now (car-sharing).
• Karen Tso of CNBC was the moderator.

They are four CEOs in a universe where speed matters. Daimler and BMW understand that this is the land grab phase and so have set up to be fast and small in each area, rather than pulling everything together in one big company that would be slow. The big picture is that we are moving from an era where most people own their own internal combustion engine car and use it exclusively, to one with a lot more flexibility, and electric vehicles.

We're here to improve life in cities across the world. In the near future, 80% of people in the world will live in cities. The aim of the JV is to transform cities and provide a seamless holistic interconnected set of mobility.

In the future, Jörg pointed out, the border between services will dissolve. It will happen first with parking and charging. Vehicles need time for maintenance and space for charging. They already have 30M customers for parking in 1000 cities. Charging is one of the big bottlenecks to having more EVs on the streets.

We have contracts with over 250 charge point operators, so we already have 8 out of every 10 existing charging points.

Marc said that the nucleus of everything for ride-hailing was MyTaxi, that was actually launched in Germany a couple of months before Uber. They grew the company by 13X to be the market leader in Europe (including lots of acquisitions). They are the leading ride-hailing product in Europe, working within the very heterogeneous regulatory environment. For example, in Barcelona, ride-hailing is not alllowed, but there are an incredible number of taxis, all accessible through the MyTaxi App.

Olivier's car sharing started with BMW Drive Now and Daimler car2go, and put them together. They now have 20,000 vehicles with a footprint world-wide in 30 cities, with 4M customers. There is a vehicle for every use case. BMW/Mercedes for a long weekend or a lot of people...or SMART and Mini if you want smaller vehciles. The target, still a couple of months off, is one car-sharing App: a single login, a single vehicle backend, and so on.

All the companies are transitioning to more services, perhaps in the same way as Apple. "We are software guys. Olivier has a lot of hardware infrastructure but he's not building the cars." We are addressing what it will take to make autonomous service available at scale, and how to manage a large fleet of cars, including space to maintain and charge those cars. We are providing the business infrastructure for autonomous vehicles, and our shareholders are providing the hardware... but it's not going to happen in just a couple of years.

We are an open multi-modal platform. We are bringing in other modalities (metro, scooters etc) and we want to be the entry point for all options in a city.

"What's your view on Tesla?" Karen asked.

Elon has done a fabulous job at bringing people in…he’s a sort of gateway drug. You have two companies here with massive trusted, safe, badass cars.

"When do you tackle Uber head to head?" Karen asked.

Yes, we are in tech biz and traditionally it is winner take all, but we compete super locally. Europe will be a highly fragmented market, not just countries, but individual cities. We need to understand every market. We already do 35M rentals per year, and 7 parking transactions per second. We help the city be a better place to live.

Arm

Simon Segars, CEO of Arm, gave a brief speech before introducing what he said was the youngest panel ever at Mobile World. Perhaps more surprisingly, it was the youngest CEO panel ever, since all four kids were CEOs of their own companies.

Since Arm is in the IP business, there is a long lead-time from when they start development through delivering the IP and their customers designing it into products. As he said:

In Arm, our technology takes a long time to be developed, to be deployed and delivered to people. So we are always trying to think ahead. We thought, “why don’t we start asking people what they think, why don’t we give them a voice in the future that we are trying to create with technology?"

For the young this is just how the world is. They're digital natives, generation arm2z. We just ran a survey polling 2000 young people 11-18.

The survey is available on the Arm website.

The panel was:

Emma Yang (from New York). She is 15 and the founder of Timeless_AI and creator of an App called Timeless to help patients suffering from Altzheimers, such as her grandmother.

Reuben Paul is the founder/CEO of CyberShaolin cybersecurity, producing small educational videos. He pointed out that things are changing:

The young generation solves problems differently from adults. We try and create things we want. Technology is changing to us, not us adapting to technology.

Avye Virolan from London, aged 11, is the founder of Girls into Coding (she started programming when she was 7).

Samaira Mehta, 10 years old, and creator the board game CoderBunnyz.

Simon got each of them to tell a bit about what their companies did, and then he invited them to tell the audience what they should be doing differently.

Samaira said:

You are part of my future, and I will be a part of your future. We have adapted to technology — we now need technology to adapt to us.

Reuben got the biggest laugh:

Technology today will impact not just our generation but many to come, so security needs to be in place. We children are going to have to come back and fix the mistakes you guys made!

Avye said:

I’d just like to say thank you. You create the systems that create our world. And I’m part of your future, pushing the boundaries of technologies that are yet to come.

With that, Simon thanked the young CEOs (and their parents for bringing them to Barcelona). Later he tweeted out a better picture than I managed to get from the wrong side of the auditorium.

Exhibits

As I expected, almost every booth in the exhibits was about 5G. It was everywhere. I'm sure the really good stuff is behind those big barriers where the mobile equipment vendors have "booths" that consist of a large fraction of the whole hall. For example, the picture on the left shows the Huawei booth, that takes up the bulk of Hall 1. But you can't get in without an appointment.

But the prize for the oddest thing I saw in the exhibition contained live bees. I guess a beehive can be a thing in IoT. It was advertising using LTE-M to do real-time hive management. If they put a tiny chip on each bee, and used 5G narrowband IoT to connect them all invididually...now that would be impressive.

Cadence had a booth at MWC. We had some new demos with partners that  I'd not seen before, along with some of the demos that we had at CES at the start of the year. I will talk about them in a future post, probably next week.

Tomorrow

The room was packed for the keynote by Guo Ping, one of Huawei's rotating chairman. Find out what he said in my post tomorrow.

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