The world’s biggest cell-phone trade show, Mobile World Congress, aims to stay in Barcelona through 2012, GSM Association spokesman Daniel Lowther confirmed this morning.
“The GSMA has signed an agreement which will keep the Mobile World Congress in the city of Barcelona for an additional three years following the 2009 event,” Lowther said in an e-mail.
There’s a lot of buzz around whether Apple will show up at CES in Las Vegas next January, but for the mobile-phone guys, MWC is where it’s at. It’s safe to say that everybody who’s anybody in the mobile industry has to keep an eye on MWC, which has grown over the past few years from a regional European show into a globe-girdling behemoth.
Last February I filed more than two dozen stories from MWC; if you’re doubtful about the value of trade shows in general, you might want to read my column championing them.
Siting very large trade shows is a difficult task; there are only a few cities that can handle a really huge crush of people. That’s what keeps CES in Las Vegas, though periodically they murmur about leaving if hotels don’t lower their rates. Smaller trade shows have more flexibility; my other major show, the biannual CTIA (the US mobile phone show) has bounced between Las Vegas, Orlando, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego and New Orleans over the past several years.
