If you’d like to speak at Mobile World Congress, it’s time to get your skates on.

Head over to the Call For Papers section on the MWC site here and submit your ideas.

I’m heading back to London this weekend — there’s a ton to do back in the Centre of Her Majesty’s Empire.

Most notably (and, er, the stuff I can discuss publicly, anyway), I’m attending both the Mboile Entertainment Forum Market event and their corresponding award ceremony. I was a judge on two of the panels and I’m looking forward to seeing which innovative companies have triumphed.

Nokia very kindly invited me to their table for the award ceremony. I shall bring you the gossip from the event as soon as I can.

What’s the Mobile Entertainment Market then? Well, here’s the overview text:

With just a few days remaining before MeM 2009 returns to London, anticipation is building. As the official annual event of MEF, MeM is the definitive gathering for mobile media community. Featuring over 80 C-Level thought leaders representing the crème-de-la crème of the multi-billion dollar mobile entertainment business, MeM 2009 is the only event that will equip you with all the information and access to decision-makers needed for focusing your business and growing revenues during these unprecedented times.

There’s some shit-hot interactive panel discussions taking place thus:

* Critical Success Factors and Trends in the Current Global Economic Climate
* Will Smartphones Take Over the Mobile Entertainment Industry?
* Special Focus on Mobile Application Stores and Widgets: Creating a New Industry
* Towards Multi-Platform Media: Mobile as the Key Enabler
* Special Focus on Mobile Application Stores and Widgets: How to get Your Apps into the Hands of the Consumer
* Smartpipe Enablers: Defining the Era of Change
* Mobile Social Networking: Can it be Monetised?
* Leveraging Opportunities in Growth Markets
* Music Has No Future in Mobile: Discuss

I’m moderating a panel. Here are the details:

11.10am
Special Focus on Mobile Application Stores (MAS) and Widgets: Creating a New Industry

- How has the mobile applications store changed the mobile content ecosystem?
- How do you ensure profitability when combining all the parts in this new ecosystem?
- Successfully integrating mobile internet into the apps experience

Moderator:
Ewan MacLeod, Founder, Mobile Industry Review

Panellists:

Anatolie Papas, Community Matchmaker, Symbian Foundation
James Parton, Head of O2 Litmus, O2 UK
Rory O’Neill, Director, Solutions and Alliances Marketing, EMEA, RIM
Faraz Syed, Chief Executive Officer, DeviceAnywhere

You can count on fireworks.

I can’t stand panel debates where executives sit wittling on about one or two talking points. On this panel we’ll have some good discussion. Those are some brilliantly knowledgeable participants and I reckon there will be some substantial opportunity to get a bit of banter going.

Here’s where I am:

- Symbian: Complete bollocks with an ever diminishing possibility of success. I firmly believe that every time the charasmatic and clearly exceedingly intelligent David Wood of Symbian brings out his EPOC Psion 5, a little Mobile Application Developer angel dies.
- o2: Semi Bollocks with occasional sunshine. The jury’s out and I’m not hearing any good news at all from them as yet.
- RIM: Abysmal application store that must have been designed by 3 blind kittens in a bag. Again, I haven’t had one single developer — ever — proclaim how delighted they were to be on the Blackberry MAS and how much cash they’d made as a result.
- DeviceAnywhere: Critical if you need to develop applications on an array of handsets.

I will, of course, qualify those statements on the day and my job is simply to moderate, stimulate and get out of the way.

Although I’m a pretty confident chap, I have a secret to tell you. I often get nervous when it comes to panel discussions. This is after a harrowing experience at an SDForum event in Silicon Valley a few years ago. I had about 13-14 wicked questions for some application developers. Questions. Points of discussion, that sort of thing. I got up on stage with a wilting panel of weirdos — did a quick introduction and … launched into my first question/prompt. To which each member of the panel said ‘no’ or ‘I haven’t got an opinion on that subject’. And repeat. For 25 minutes. Me and the audience spent that time thinking ‘what a load of cocks’ of the panelists. I ended up laughing out loud and began making up positions to which each panelist simply answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Like a robotic arse. Thus I have a secret fear of moderating panels lest such an experience happen again.

Luckily each of the participants on my MEM panel will be able to not only handle my (often) unique and direct perspective but they’ll also be able to hold their own in any discussions. Bring it on.

If you’ve got any particular questions you’d like me to fire at the panel (even if you’re not coming to the event), let me know. I’ll make a note of their answers and post them here.

Everything you’d like to know about MEM is here. If you’re going (and let’s face it… if you’re not, and you work in the field of Mobile Entertainment, what is wrong with you?) then look me up and come and say hi.

Remember my post about MIR 3.0 hunting for contributors? Here’s our first submission! It’s just a quick one from reader Malcolm Murphy who is not entirely impressed at next week’s Global Messaging conference.

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Next week sees the 2009 Global Messaging conference. Leading lights of the mobile industry gather to talk about how to increase ARPU with instant messaging, email and all the rest. Up until recently, I’d probably have been there as well.

But I don’t work in the mobile space any more, and boy has my perspective changed. From the outside looking in, Global Messaging 2009 doesn’t look that different from Global Messaging 2007 or 2008. It’s mostly the same mix of service providers and messaging vendors, mostly talking about the same stuff. And almost certainly from a mobile industry viewpoint; not from the consumer viewpoint.

And that’s the #1 problem in the mobile industry: it’s extremely insular. So while there are going to be a lot of talented, well-intentioned, creative mobile messaging specialists getting together next week to talk about how to move mobile messaging forward, nothing new will come of it.

Still, at least you can MMS on the iPhone now.

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Nice one Malcolm. Is it possible that the Global Messaging industry can ever surprise and delight us again?

It’s all kicking off on the 16th of July in San Francisco. That’s the day of VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference. Not only are the VentureBeat team programming what looks to be an absolutely fantastic array of speakers, they’re also going to be announcing the winners of the MobileBeat Startup Competition.

If you’re a mobile startup, stop everything and go and submit yourself for consideration.

Matt Marshall, VentureBeat’s top dude, along with a handful of expert judges will take a look at your submission. They’ll pick seven companies to each spend 5 minutes pitching the MobileBeat conference. The conference attendees will then select a winner.

Last year they selected AdMob and Loopt as winners so you’ll be in good company.

I highly recommend getting involved — and coming along to the conference. Take a look at the speaker list and you’ll get an idea of the quality of the attendees.

I’ll see you there!

I’m in San Francisco at the moment so I can’t make it out to Mobile Monday London’s hot rocking event tomorrow night.

But if you’re around, and if you can get tickets — you need to be quick and you need to pre-register — it should be worth your while.

The following innovative companies are demoing:

Vopium - like skype but integrated into your phone book
Peepr.TV - web cam streaming to your phone
0870.me - make 0870 calls at standard rate
Photofit - photo mashup application (couldn’t find their web address)
Total Hotspots - Rummble your nearest wifi hotspot
Audioboo - audio microblogging, much loved by Stephen Fry, amongst others.
Artilium - making LBS easy
Proxama - NFC wallet
Ookl - mobile learning
Singtones - mobile karaoke
Masabi - rail ticketing
Corebridge - CRM on the go
Spoonfed - London restaurant app

It looks like a brilliant line-up.

We interviewed Masabi at one of the recent MIR Mobile Developer events back in January. Check out part one and part two.

You can register for the event here at the official Mobile Monday London site.

By the way, whoever came up with the term, ‘momolo’ (the site is www.momolo.org)… genius.

If you go, let me know how you get on.