We were invited to speak at this year’s FMC Summit on rather short notice about three weeks ago. The event was organized by IIR Telecoms & Technology and took place in Munich from 03/11/08 to 03/14/08. We had a chance to present PavingWays and Groupile in the first of two “Innovation Showcase” sessions on Wednesday. It was a nice opportunity to present what we are working on to a critical and at least in part mobile-web-oriented audience.

To be honest we didn’t really know what FMC was before the conference, but since it apparently was a topic incorporating “mobile” and “convergence” we felt like it was a good fit for us. FMC, belonging to the wide field of IMS, actually encompasses a wide range of services and technologies, mostly related to network infrastructure and the bundling and the convergence of various products, such as mobile and fixed line tariffs or DSL, phone and TV bundles also known as Triple play.

We met many interesting people from an incredible amount of different countries, such as Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, Turkey, the UK. Most of them were representatives of major mobile carriers/network operators. We also had interesting discussions with representatives of the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Device Management Forum.

Some interesting points and thoughts from the presentations at the conference:

- Question: Will cool and ubiquitous devices (GSM, WiFI, Homezone) be network operator independent? That means the user could then choose the cheapest or quickest connection on demand across providers.
Answer (T-Mobile): Users would love it, because polls show they see their mobile handset as a friend, but the provider as the cleaning lady. Users also want a cheap handset, but T-Mobile don’t think that this will be happening. On the contrary T-Mobile Germany has an exclusive partnerhsip with Apple and they think this will be the way to go in the future.

- T-Mobile is relaxed about VoIP coming to the iPhone, because you can already make phone calls with it as opposed to a laptop where VoIP fills a gap.

- telephone numbers will become less relevant, sometime in the future it could be replaced by something like your Facebook or MySpace account

Thanks go out to Alex from IIR Telecoms for the nicely organized and well managed event.