By Caesar Vallejos
Eagle News Service online correspondent
BARCELONA, Spain (Eagle News) — Eagle Broadcasting Corporation, one of the major broadcasting companies in the Philippines, joins the Mobile World Congress 2016, the world’s biggest and most influential mobile event held in Barcelona, Spain which opened last February 22, 2016.
With this year’s theme, “Mobile is Everything”, the world’s movers and shakers in the mobile society gathered to address the challenges facing the industry in the next five years. Termed “gigabit society” by Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao, the challenge of key players include providing high speeds, low latency and strong level of security.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his part stressed that there are still four billion people who are not connected to the internet. This should be the focus of the Congress rather than making the connections faster for wealthy people.
In the Philippines, telecom giant Globe Telecom was the first to partner with Facebook, providing the service free to some subscribers who consume a certain range of data services. It was part of the Internet.org initiative of connecting the world’s population.
Zuckerberg pushes for the Free Basics model in 38 countries which attracted 19 million people who do not have internet access before. However, he announced that the Free Basics is banned in India.
On the eve of his keynote, Zuckerberg on his page showed behind the scenes of his company’s partnership with Samsung on Virtual Reality (VR) through the Gear 360 handsets via Oculus, FB’s VR firm. VR, according to Zuckerberg can become the most social platform.
In the Mobile Daily, mobile predictions for 2016 by Chris Bergey, VP of SanDisk Corporation include the following:
1) Storage of smartphones will nearly double to 77.2 GB by 2018;
2) Consumers and manufacturers to concentrate on speed;
3) Virtual reality, 3D photography and 4K Ultra HD to change how we make and consume content;
4) Global internet traffic to grow threefold over the next five years with users downloading movies that could take up to 80 GB;
5) Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi will shake up smartphone markets 6) Thin smartphones will be in;
7) Use and adoption of drones will be faster requiring drive capacities and cards;
8) Consumers will turn in smartphones more rapidly and repurposed smartphones will be a significant market;
9) Use and versatility of microSD cards and slots will grow;
10) Smartphones will be the connecting key to everything.
At the MWC 2016, EBC is represented by Correspondent Caesar Vallejos and Business Development Manager Robert Capistrano.