My Adventures at MWC 2013 or Barcelona, There and Back
Hi Habr!
Many of us have already a huge baggage of experience gained during travels, dozens of exhibitions, conferences, flights and trips, business trips and walks, foreign and not only.
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In this topic, I will talk about how I first went to Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2013, how I got to the Spanish police before I left the plane, about the hikes around Barcelona at night and about personal impressions of the stands of almost all the companies that I listed in tags to this topic.
If you are an experienced traveler - perhaps my story will allow you to remember your first adventures away from home, and if you only dream of visiting the MWC in the future, you will be interested to find out how it actually happens by my personal example.
By the way, 4040 words and 25 illustrations are waiting for you inside. Not a joke :)
Looking for the MWC Pass
It all started about a month before the trip - my Facebook feed was flooded with many offers to win an entrance ticket to the MWC “by simply sharing the link among all my friends”. After a brief acquaintance with the rules, it turned out that the “share” link was offered as much as two weeks, gaining points for each transition through it, and only a dozen winners will receive tickets, whose share of attracted people will be the highest. During the day, the number of people attracted by such a “pyramid” increased by more than a thousand and I did not participate in this attraction of unprecedented generosity.
I simply did not decide to buy and buy a ticket for a rather trivial reason - the usual Exhibition Visitor Pass (EVP) was € 699, Silver Pass € 2199, Gold Pass € 2699 and Platinum Pass € 4999.
The next option was to get a "gift" ticket from large companies. The registration on the Samsung website for the Samsung Developers Day event was over before I could find out about it, but the registration from Nokia was open. In order to qualify for a promotion pass, I made an answer to a small questionnaire, but preference was clearly given to those who already attended to getting a ticket in advance. There it was proposed to put an inconspicuous tick on participation in the "event Sotavento", which turned out to be an invitation to a party of Nokia App Developer, in the eponymous night club Sotavento.
As usual with Nokia, everything went in a rather mysterious way, first I left the e-mail for pre-registration, then I registered during the open registration, a week later I received an e-mail about the start of the registration “for pre-registered”, but re-register my e -mail could not. To be faithful, I registered for an alternative e-mail (I entered the data in the same questionnaire), and two weeks before the exhibition I received two e-mails: one about successful registration for an alternative e-mail (but without the MWC Pass) and the second with an apology about refusal of registration (on the main e-mail). Why so - the mystery of the dark.
Then I decided to go a more complicated way and apply for an MWC Press Pass. For this, it was necessary to fill out a questionnaire and provide links to their published materials (at least five links, with a publication duration of at least six months before the exhibition), confirming materials from the editorial board (for example, a recommendation letter from the editor-in-chief), as well as PDF documents with publications appeared in the print press. Having enlisted the support of the editorial board of one of the major Russian IT publications, and providing the entire set of requested information (and links to publications in Russian, including), I began to wait.
In the meantime, several familiar developers from neighboring cities received their tickets - mainly due to cooperation with foreign companies that have their own booth at the MWC. Suddenly, in exactly the set time frame (seven working days from the moment of submission of the documents) I received my Press Pass. Hooray!
It turned out that the number of “opportunities” among the press was much greater than that of ordinary visitors, although I did not manage to use most of them. By requesting an invitation letter, I received it on time - three days later (it was two PDF sheets in English and Spanish, with a scanned signature of a representative of GSMA of disgusting quality, at about 100 dpi). With this invitation, I received a Schengen visa for a month without any problems.
Approximately at the same stage, inspired by success, I made a strategically not the most correct decision - to introduce austerity, and therefore I bought the cheapest plane tickets for the plane. The Kiev-Girona flight (about 120 km from the center of Barcelona) of the Hungarian airline WizzAir seemed an acceptable option. Arrival time is nine in the evening on February 24, just before the last but one bus to Barcelona. Let me remind you that this year's MWC took place from February 25 to February 28.
Departing from the new Terminal "A" of the airport "Kiev Zhuliany", I drew attention to the very loyal attitude of the airport employees to the passengers. For example, despite the restrictions on the ticket on the number of pieces of hand luggage (1 seat), passengers were allowed to take more than one bag, etc.
Finally, the flight began and our A320 aircraft slowly began its three-hour flight. Having settled in an armchair at the aisle, I plunged into a fascinating reading of the book Singapore Story: From the Third World to the First, and the passenger in front of me began watching the movie on his laptop.
Drama
However, as soon as the plane went to land and the passengers fastened their seat belts, a passenger of 35-40 years old passed, or rather half-crawled to the right of me, and hit the passenger in the seat in front of me. A second later, it became clear that the goal of this campaign was undisguised aggression; in the dimly lit cabin a standing passenger struck the seated person (and the passenger who was fastened). As soon as the landing gear had touched the landing strip, the aggressive passenger “switched” to me from the shaking that occurred, and immediately struck me several times, as they say, on the face. Having taken a defensive position, I avoided, incidentally dropping the tablet (from which I read) on the floor, but the situation changed dramatically - they began to choke me, squeezing my neck and Kadyk with force with my fingers. Involuntary, terrible rattling from the air coming out of my lungs, frightened me, for the first time, the thought flashed through my mind that this incident might end badly for me. Only at this moment, one of the passengers (friends of the first victim) got rid of the seat belt and pulled the attacker away from me. For all this time, none of the flight attendants appeared in the cabin, and none of the passengers got up from their seats to intervene.
Finally, on the speakerphone in the cabin of the already stopped aircraft, it was announced that a fight in the cabin is an exceptional situation, and therefore there will be no landing before the appearance of the police. The stewardess handed me a wet napkin to stop the blood from the abrasions. That's how I arrived in Spain.
In the police
Before the advent of the police, the cabin had a heated discussion on what happened. To begin with, they stated the obvious - the attacker is in a state of intoxication, and it is not clear how he was allowed on the plane in this form. Obviously, he could not reach the “condition” by drinking alcohol at a cost of € 2 per 50 ml. The cause of the conflict is a crush in the cabin of the bus that was carrying passengers to the ramp. Even there, the first victim and the attacker started a verbal conflict, which eventually resulted in a fight, but our “anti-hero” was so drunk that he simply could not tell who he was beating and strangling.
Four Spanish policemen, having entered the cabin, “arrested” (just brought under the arms) the attacker, the first victim, me, and, apparently for reliability, a couple of friends who were friends of both sides of the conflict, without really understanding “who is who” - because English of the four guards did not understand the order. With grief in half, an English-speaking policeman was found in the airport building, who quickly explained that if we write “refusal of claims” - everything is resolved quickly, and if we declare the fact of a fight - we are delayed at least until tomorrow. After weighing all the pros and cons (because the exhibition is already tomorrow morning, and the time is later), we decided to abandon the claims.
It took “just” one hour of time. Writing down all the data and making copies of the passports, we (me and the second passenger) were quickly and quickly escorted to passport control. Smiling, the passport control officer took our passports and ... He put us stamps on departure, the 24th. Again, searches for English-speaking workers, explanations that we have just arrived - and now we spend another half an hour in the next police station, which deals with issues of passport control. Finally, we get a stamp on the entrance, crossed out stamps on the departure and get into the waiting room - because the bus left for Barcelona for a long time, and the next - at midnight. Only I remain in the waiting room, a few other passengers waiting for the morning flight and - correctly - an aggressive passenger in the company of three friends, who are also late for the bus. I do not know if the concept of “fortunately” applies here, but the level of alcoholic intoxication of an aggressive passenger was such that he was simply unable to recognize the goal of his aggression in me. He wondered for a long time why I refuse to join “his company” since I, too, “for some reason” were late for the bus.
Considering that I’m arriving at my place of residence in Barcelona much later than expected, I decided to warn the landlady (I found accommodation with the help of AirBnB). This is where the first IT surprises began. Firstly, despite the lauded “hundreds of countries” with roaming, my “national” operator TriMob was not friendly with any of the Spanish mobile operators, and Wi-Fi at the airport was offered only paid.
Free Wi-Fi was available at MacDonalds, which, due to late hours, was already closed (along with its Internet access point, which is quite surprising). Filled with the desire to use a paid service (curiously), I found out that you can pay for Wi-Fi only with a credit card. Having prepared the card, I connect to the network - asking for a username and password. Feel free to click on the registration - yeah, the Spanish version. We find a switch to the English version of the site, waiting for more ... What a surprise, only the title page has been translated. To continue, you need to register in Spanish from about 15 points that are completely intuitive. Or simply purchase a sim card with mobile internet at your nearest Movistar kiosk. Unfortunately closed due to late time. In general, left alone, without access to the Internet.
Night Barcelona
Arriving in Barcelona at half past one nights along with the passengers of the late French flight, I found a closed metro and a complete “Internet dependency” of all services for determining the route of night buses.
Having estimated the distance to the place of residence as “probably 5 kilometers”, I went on a hike. Before the start of the trip, I did not take into account two things - the first is the night air temperature (near zero) and the second is that the throat after the attempt to suffocate has the ugly property of being sick terribly. I consoled myself only with the discovery of the beauties of the night city, and the cost of a taxi (€ 50-60) encouraged my enthusiasm.
As it turned out, the distance from the bus station to the place of residence was 8.9 km. So by 4 am I had just arrived, which made the owner very happy. Fortunately, in this case, I brought with me a box of delicious chocolates, which slightly smoothed the impression of a late arrival. For the next surprise, I was morally prepared (we remember that we have a share - we save on everything), the apartment was absolutely not heated at all. Five blankets were supposed to compensate for the temperature of +2 ° C heat, but most of all, of course, wool socks were saved - a gift from my grandmother.
Fira Gran Via
Having arrived at Fira Gran Via, after a short two-hour sleep, I quickly received my badge (with a printout with a QR-code), and later on I switched to an actively advancing NFC badge. After a one-time validation of the photo at the issue point, I checked all the input checks by simply putting the device running the NFC Badge application on the reader.
I will try to tell you very briefly about my impressions of visiting stands - for a full detailed story about the most interesting of them, you will need a separate topic, which I hope I will write in the very near future.
Fortunately, my view of the “fighter” passing through the front line did not prevent me from visiting most of the planned stands. To begin with, I looked in the "Media Village", the place where most of the news from the MWC of all world publications was written from. Oh miracle - free coffee :)
Nokia
In the meantime, I managed to find out the password for free Wi-Fi, and looked in on Twitter. Oh, the horror - it’s already ten minutes since the Nokia press conference began. I managed to reach the necessary hall only by the time Steven Elop began to answer the tricky questions "When to wait for Windows Phone with 41Mp Pure View?" - alas, there was no specific answer to this question.
Immediately after the end of the presentation, a demonstration of new Lumia models began - more knowledgeable journalists went to a specially fenced press department, but numerous “reviewers” including from Russia, stubbornly trying to make video reviews among the crowd. They were interrupted for about every minute, I still can’t get to see how the final video was glued together. I especially remember the moment when helpful stand workers literally every 5 seconds walked around the cameraman (only television workers shot video cameras) and interrupted the “reportage” with questions “May I help you?”
By the way, Coca-Cola transferred some of its employees to Windows Phone (and more specifically to Nokia’s Lumia), because everywhere they distributed the cold Coca-Cola.
About visitors and golla
It should be noted that there were quite a lot of Russian-speaking visitors. Surprisingly, everyone thought that everyone around was speaking English, and therefore the situation when one could hear dialogue in the style near the stands "- What kind of a fig is it? - Oh, that is Chinese moutine!" Happened more often than we would like. I admit that, let's say, the Chinese behaved in the same way, but I doubt it a little bit. The Japanese kept the hall 8.1 with the “Japanese town”, where I, by the way, stopped by, having probably already received the tenth press release about the discovery of “the most amazing of miracles, a social city, which will open in Tokyo in April”.
Having difficulty finding the booth + foop (the company launching this project), I found out that we are talking about placing a dozen or so NFC tags in tourist and not only places in the city, linked to social networks and building a graph of links between project participants. The press releases looked much more promising, really. Stand Golla - manufacturer of handbags and accessories, I mentioned to recall the fact that in half of the first day of the exhibition, about eight bags were stolen from their rather large stand. The girls on the stand sadly joked that this shows how popular Golla products are.
About mail
By the way, literally two words about the mail, after my accreditation for the Press Pass was approved, I received at least three hundred press releases, about a hundred invitations to visit the stands and countless mass mailings starting with Dear Sir. And this is not to mention the regular distribution of the GSMA itself. Gmail labels helped me a little to organize this avalanche, maybe in the future I’ll think about a separate mail for such events.
ASUS
Although I skipped directly the presentation held at a hotel near Fira, I remember the ASUS stand with the original design - unlike the open booths of other companies, the ASUS stand was closed, it was possible to enter it only through a separate entrance, and the number of visitors was adjusted to avoid influx people. ASUS PadFone ™ Infinity, Fonepad - I think I will talk about the ASUS stand in a separate habratopic, especially since I noticed a number of interesting features in these and other ASUS devices.
Yota devices
The Chinese delegations went to organized groups, and the only ones who distinguished themselves as “espionage disease” towards the Chinese were Yota Devices. Their stand was protected from all sides, let inside groups, in the hands of the device reluctantly given, to photograph - no light or place. For reliability inside the luminous stands placed mock devices. Fortunately, with the Russian-speaking press they shared information very willingly. Another pleasant observation - at the stand Yota there was a real stir and queues, a subjective impression - YotaPhone managed to arouse interest in the world press. Well, or learn the secret art of organizing queues from scratch.
Motorola
Much attention at the stand of Motorola was devoted to the Razr I model - based on the Intel Atom processor. Perhaps I was surprised most of all in the demonstration by the really fast camera work (including instant face recognition, etc.). Alas, by letting a stand worker count my badge (this, by the way, was a normal practice, the badge was read using NFC) I doomed myself to hail of calls from the USA, and the flow of questions asking if I wanted to develop something for Motorola. In addition, after looking closely, I found out that despite the speed, the quality of the Razr I images leaves much to be desired. In addition to 3D images on the floor, the Motorola booth is no longer memorable. Another prototype of the device from Intel at their booth (also on Android) took photographs by an order of magnitude better and faster.
LG
The press service of LG. Ukraine contacted me before the trip and promised to send all the information about the meeting later. Alas, this never happened. When I arrived at the LG stand, representatives of many countries, from Brazil to the USA, were in the list of meetings, but no Ukraine was found there. Not too upset, I went to inspect the booth as an ordinary visitor. LG pleased visitors with at least huge touch tables where Optimus G Pro happily put and huge circles shone around it. I could not seize the moment and put it on the Siemens M55 touch table.The glowing circle did not appear, and the Koreans laughed loudly for about three minutes, such a rarity next to the tablet phones seemed like a toy :) Another amusement - all the devices presented were designed for the Korean market - and therefore equipped with long antennas (if I'm not mistaken, for DVB- TV H). The flagship antenna height reached half a meter and, as it is sad, almost broke under its own weight when I pulled it to its full length. Even at the stand, it was possible to print a photo from the LG phone on a portable LG photo printer. The quality was very mediocre, but the souvenir is wonderful. On the battery life of a girl carrying a printer on the stand could only say that they change the battery very often, like a photo paper cartridge.
Samsung
Samsung's stand was divided into three large-large areas. It’s a pity I couldn’t take a photograph of a “service plan” drawn with a ballpoint pen on which local workers marked “what’s
HTC
I think that the HTC booth this year can be safely renamed to the HTC One booth. HTC One, HTC One, HTC One and also HTC One were demonstrated on the stand. There were no other HTC products at all. I'm afraid I will give a reason for slander to those who are awaiting updates for previous HTC products, but the impression is that, besides the HTC One, the company no longer does anything. To demonstrate the photo-capabilities on the stand, decisively complex “light” conditions were created, shimmering light with twilight. Acrobats acted - again, to photograph them with the HTC Zoe function. To demonstrate the stereo speakers, HTC Boom built a soundproof room (personal impression - the sound is not outstanding and not extra loud, left the stand puzzled). There was also a gallery with examples of the production of the HTC One case from a single piece of aluminum.
Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel
You might be surprised that three such different companies are in the headline. The fact is that despite the external differences, the stands of these companies were similar - smartphones were displayed on them. And that's all.Separate tables, places for photographing, decoration ... Of course, each of the companies tried to attract visitors with something, but the overall impression was exactly that. The only thing that was remembered was that at the ZTE stand there was a separate sample of ZTE Open with installed Firefox OS. The device looked discharged, and when I tried to turn it on I vibrated. The booth worker reported that there was no battery in the device, and directed me to the Mozilla stand. How could vibrate the device without battery remains a mystery without an answer.
On the stand, Alcatel made a miscalculation with security, all the devices were on the alarm, and (the same) devices showing different colors of the case were simply inserted into the slots next to the demo sample. The guard was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, regularly picking up visitors and inserting devices back into the slots.
Sony
Sony has made its stand interesting. Sony has its own representative on Habrahabr, and in the preliminary correspondence prior to the exhibition he informed me that he didn’t need a separate review of the stand, but he would tell about the premiers himself. Well, let it be so. I will tell only personal impressions - I liked the company's stand, the demonstration of water-resistant devices (improvised swings lowering the Sony Z and Sony Tablet Z into the water at the touch of a button) and a demo stand where you could compare the structure of pixels FullHD under a microscope that displays the image on the big screen Sony Z screen and other devices (it was suggested to put your smartphone for comparison). Perhaps this is exactly the place where the example showed and explained what really is the difference between the mobile screens of 1920x1080 and 1280x720 (compared Sony Z and Sony T).Separately, I note that Sony is one of the partners in the initiative with the GSMA NFC Experience, which seems to be a success and in which I participated. Take this opportunity - thanks to Sony :)
Intel and Qualcomm
Intel had about twelve separate demonstration booths on its stand, and Qualcomm also organized their booth in the same way. I admit, it was not possible to master all of them (although the most persistent, after listening to at least 5 demonstrations, Intel offered to take part in the prize draw from Motorola). I remember - a demonstration of technology that accelerates the Android emulator many, many times. If I am not mistaken about this on Habré already wrote. Qualcomm has interesting demonstrations related to their developments in the field of LTE data transfer.
i'm watch
There will be a paragraph of a very, very, very subjective opinion - I didn’t like the stand of this company at all. They sent press releases, gave the press discounts of € 50, gave a lot of very beautiful printing, but it was just a thick watch, with a grainy screen, a single side button “back”, stylized not even under iOS, but under iPod Touch. Yes, they have a varied color gamut, an operating system with applications (each of which must begin with i'm% program name%), but their potential seems to me clearly overvalued. Than they are fundamentally better, for example, I didn’t catch the Chinese “chasofonov” on the same cut-down Android. The same ugly fonts, cropped labels - in a word, I was left disappointed.
Fujitsu
In addition to smartphones on the Fujitsu stand, I found as many as two interesting new products - a virtual keyboard, which requires a front-facing camera (for example, a tablet) with a resolution of 2 megapixels, and a futuristic augmented reality helmet, using a translucent mirror that guides the laser into the eye, catching reflected from the retina laser beam and projecting the image on top of what the eye sees. Be sure to talk about this in a separate habratopike.
Jolla, Opera, Mozilla
I continue to merge so different companies under one heading, and all because both Jolla and Opera showed on their booths demo versions of their new (latest) products - this is Opera 7.5 for Android and running on the N950 Sailfish OS. If other authors do not overtake me - reviews of these products will soon be released. On the stands, I can only say that the representatives and Opera and Jolla were extremely kind and pleasant, it is a pleasure to communicate with them.
The guys from Mozilla gave a separate interview about their Firefox OS, which will also be released soon.
Canonical
Ubuntu for Android was shown on Nexus 4 and Nexus 10. Alas, it was the very build that was available at that time and Canonical representatives didn’t say anything new. Moreover, they argued that new builds should be expected only once every six months, and we already know what happened a little differently. Inquiries about the prospects for porting Ubuntu to other devices have come down to the fact that this is a task for enthusiasts, but not for Ubuntu developers, and in general this is not the final goal. The emphasis on the stand was to disseminate information already available.
Nvidia
To begin with, it turned out that the meeting I had made was not with NVidia at all, but with Vivid Games, who would have to demonstrate their new Real Boxing ™ on Project Shield on Tegra 4 from NVidia. It was then that it turned out that for “unnamed reasons” there will be no demonstration, Project Shield is not shown in action, look at it behind glass, and the maximum that we can expect is to look at the game on the demo tablets on Tegra 4. Well, we take what we have, we launch Real Boxing, we take into our hands a USB-connected gamepad and ... the tablet on the Tegra 4 hangs tight. Representatives of NVidia with impenetrable faces are asked to go to the next tablet, meanwhile removing the battery from a frozen tablet with a sharp movement. The game itself seemed to me quite enjoyable, the Vivid representative was glad to hear a flattering review - it turns outHe is one of the direct developers.
A lot of other stands
I think somewhere here it is worth stopping to tell about each stand separately. I want to thank all those who have read this far - surely those who have also been at this MWC are now “yawning” most of all, and have added completely different impressions about the exhibition. Nevertheless, visiting the stands of “small” companies brought a lot of surprises, which I hope will tell you in the near future. Happened when visiting and funny things - for example, remember about "ultrahydrophobic" coating? I spotted such a stand and even tried to “wet” a nano-coated napkin, and yes — it was dry. Alas, all the workers of the stand owned only Spanish, and therefore, apart from getting a "promotional bag" for products covered by this very coating, I could not learn anything new.
Parties!
I managed to attend several parties after the exhibition in the evening. What can you write about parties? The Nokia App Party was great. And delicious. And funny. And it's great :) Unfortunately, I did not attend the WIPJam party, so I can’t say anything about it. But the last MLove Party left a depressing impression. It was held at the famous Ocana Club of Barcelona - SPB-TV and Mercedes Benz were sponsors, but they only managed to remove for the party a space comparable to the staircase near the elevator, a kind of square around the closed lower floor and closed upper floor. Tightness, strict check at the entrance, turn and as much as one free drink (in exchange for an entrance ticket) - no, we don’t need such parties. Surprisingly, you need to take an example from Nokia! :)
Once again, I thank everyone who has read my story about the MWC, having re-read it, I realized that I haven’t yet told a lot, but I need to put an end somewhere. Thanks for attention!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/171569/
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