Intelligent connectivity marks the beginning of a new era of highly contextualised and personalised experiences, delivered when and where you want them. With this in mind, the events in MWC 2019 focused on 8 core technologies/themes. MWC was held at two locations in the city, with the bigger event at Fira Gran Via.

To explore new avenues, to build connections with potential customers and partners around the world, JIG-SAW visited the beautiful city of Barcelona in Spain to show its exciting IoT service, neqto. The event might prove to be instrumental to the growth of neqto as the team could interact with established pioneers and novel start-ups in IoT to talk about the future possibilities of IoT.

About 1200 people visited the booth in the four days as neqto attracted a number of potential customers and future partners as a unique end-to-end IoT solution with enough flexibility to have more use cases than most of its competitors. The visitors included engineers, managers, CEO’s of big and large firms.

The event overall had surprisingly a very exciting atmosphere given the amount of crowd.

Summarising the event, let’s look at the major aspects of three of these core themes and what the event had to offer for each:

1. Connectivity (5G): 5G was the MVP of the event as it took the spotlight showing the potentials and possibilities in all of the themes, ranging from gaming, cloud computing, drone surveillance, blockchain, AI, security and much more. Every major telecom player in the world showcased its 5G technology in the event.

2. AI: With the advancements in faster computing and network capabilities capable of offloading heavy tasks to cloud servers paving the way to have close-to-real-time systems, the use of AI in various industrial sectors is increasing drastically as was witnessed during the event.

3. Industry 4.0 (IoT): Services based on new technologies like NB-IoT, LTE-M, and LoRa were displayed under this umbrella. The incredible growth in the sector was patent by the number of companies exhibiting under the theme with either partial or complete services in terms of software, hardware, network capabilities or supporting technologies.

Embedded system was not left behind as products in this category showcased the improvements in low power microcontrollers. Also, another technical core theme, Immersive Content (AR/VR) saw a good number of exhibitors especially with unveils of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and HTC Vive Focus.

The other 4 themes; “Disruptive Innovations”, “Digital Wellness”, “Digital Trust”, and “The Future” focused more on the social and ideological aspects of the recent and upcoming growth in technology to spread awareness about the heavy implications on the ecosystem of the consumer as we move towards a more automated and technology driven world, with a number of seminars and discussions on the topics.

A number of interactive demonstrations made the event very immersive. I'll write about some of them.

Turkcell had a drink mixer that mixes juices based on the mood, rhythm and beats of the music so one can taste the music.

The possibilities of 5G in robotics was displayed by two robots that could a manufacture a eye mascara in a matter of seconds in precise movements at high speeds in a collaborative manner by communicating with each other through a 5G connection.

Talking more about robots, there was a hugging robot, a humanoid that can repeatedly perform movements with high accuracy like putting a needle through another needle eye (by Cloudminds) and an interactive robot that can show emotions like that a human baby (LIKU).

Smartphones. One cannot talk about MWC and leave the plethora of smartphones unveiled at the event. There were major previews from big brands like Huawei, Samsung, LG, MI, Nokia, One Plus and many more, that marked the next generation of smartphones with technologies like 5G, e-sim, foldable screens, extreme weather tolerance and much more...

A smartphone app by EyeQue called clone that can accurately scan a small 3D object using just one camera by placing it onto a asymmetric checkboard and further utilise Apple's 3D motion engine to give life to a hologram with uncanny accuracy and resemblance to the object.

Mediatek also showcased their advanced computer-vision technology that could track human pose for up to three people at a very small latency of 30ms using a single camera smartphone. They put on an exciting show as the onlookers saw robots dancing with the motions tracked from a dancer and mapped to them.

Other than the overwhelming amount of new technology showcased, the event also had many fun elements, like a band show, a board that mapped the traffic over the world by leveraging the fact that the huge successful event saw about 10,000 from 198 countries.