It’s the world’s biggest meeting of mobile industry experts, enthusiasts and original equipment manufacturers and, once again, Canonical will be in attendance.
Mobile World Congress 2014 kicks off in Barcelona, Spain on February 24 and runs until the 27th.
The annual event is often used by companies to unveil new hardware and showboat advances in new mobile technology.
It’s not all phones and frolics. The event also holds a respected conference that gives platform to ‘thought-leaders’, analysts and industry players. Keynote speakers this year include Mark Zuckerberg, WhatsApp’s Jan Koum, and IBM CEO Virginia M. Rometty.
Seminars, discussion panels and meetings are also held throughout the four-day gathering.
What To Expect from Canonical
Canonical used last year’s event to demonstrate the (then newly released) developer previews of Ubuntu for Tablets and Smartphones. This year looks set to offer more of the same.
Are shiny new demos all we can expect to see from Ubuntu at MWC?
Canonical are pitching up a stall in the “App Planet” section — billed by organisers as ‘the centre of the mobile apps universe’ where developers can network and engage with each other — to, they say, show off the latest progress on Ubuntu for Phones and Tablets and ‘showcas[e] a variety of ways to discover content on Ubuntu – from native and web apps to our unique scopes”.
Are shiny new demos of Unity all we can expect to see from Ubuntu at MWC?
With anticipation for hardware-related announcements building, and hints from within the company that smaller OEMs are ‘likely’ to debut devices this year, it wouldn’t be out of the blue.
Canonical themselves are not (yet) listed as exhibiting in the event’s main halls which is where hardware is typically shown off.
Mark Shuttleworth’s Input
In addition to sharing square footage with the likes of Microsoft, Samsung, the Tizen Association and hundreds of other app and software vendors, Mark Shuttleworth will also be popping up on stage as part of a conference discussion on “Building the 50 billionth Connected Device” alongside Freescale’s Sylvain Gardet and Colin Giles of Huawei.
For more information on the conference agenda, list of exhibitors and seminar schedule head over to the official website.