Click To View Slideshow» You can throw a rock anywhere at MWC and hit some cutting-edge business tech. Here are this year's most eye-catching finds.
BARCELONA—Mobile World Congress is about a lot more than just smartphones. The enterprise side of the show is a conference unto itself.
Tech giants like SAP rolled out cloud platform enhancements and new enterprise iOS apps, and a laundry list of others—from Cisco, Ericsson, and VMware to Oracle, HP Enterprise, Red Hat, and many more—announced partnerships to virtualize next-gen telecommunications infrastructure. Facebook also continued its quest to connect the world.
We also saw seemingly half the companies at MWC exhibiting some kind of Internet of Things (IoT) or connected devices solution focusing on interoperability and IoT security, and plenty of advancements around e-commerce, mobile payments, and point-of-sale (POS) from the likes of MasterCard and Visa.
Then there were the emerging technologies. Enterprise augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications were everywhere. Panels featuring the likes of Google, IBM, Adobe, and PayPal talked about the future of virtual assistants and chat bots in business and in our lives, and countless apps touted the machine learning (ML) and computer vision algorithms working under the surface to make their experiences smarter and more contextual.
MWC is also extremely fertile ground for startups. We saw new and exciting companies exhibiting from all over the world, and some of the startup world's biggest recent success stories like Twilio explaining what the future of communication might hold. It wasn't all optimism, though. We got a grim look at the future of net neutrality in a keynote from new FCC chairman Ajit Pai.
And yes, there were shiny new business-focused smartphones. We couldn't include every eye-catching piece of tech showed off from hall to cavernous hall across the vast show floor, but check out 10 of the best business devices, app experiences, and cool finds we came across at this year's Mobile World Congress.
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