One of the funniest sitcoms in history, at least in my opinion, was the incredibly short lived but hysterically funny Fawlty Towers. A tour-de-force by John Cleese as a minor hotel owner in a seaside town in the South West of England. If you haven't seen it, stop reading and go and find it.

One of the minor characters is Manuel, an unfortunate soul working for Cleese's horrendous Basil Fawlty. Nothing Manuel does is right even when Basil is at fault, and every infraction is blamed simply on the fact that Manuel is from Barcelona.

Well, in a few days pretty much every body in the mobile industry will be in Barcelona too. It's the annual GSM Association conference there. This will be my 10th year and the second time I'm going as part of a new company, and the first time as CEO. It's an amazing event - 50,000+ people crowded into the old Olympic center displaying and selling the leading in mobile technologies. We'll be there, exhibiting at the Alcatel Lucent stand in Hall 7. I'll post more on that tomorrow.

Here I wanted to focus on what I'm expecting to see or hoping to...

Windows Phone 7 - having developed our V1 solution on Windows Mobile, I feel that, out of loyalty I should be excited about that. But I feel like I've been invited to the ball once too often by MS and they've never actually taken me. Everybody I know at Microsoft tells me how wonderful it is, but I still haven't seen evidence of this. I'm still not convinced we'll see anything other than canned demos even now
Apps! Lots and lots of apps. I'm on record as not being persuaded by the concept of Browser based services for mobile phones and I think Apple has, in a way, locked the mindshare of the phone using community into the app in the way that SMS has for messaging. Let's be honest here. Nobody in their right mind would send 140 character messages at $0.25 a message, but we all do, even though we have email. Why? Because it works. I think Apps will be the same
Location and Augmented Reality - I'm hoping to see a lot of this. Why? Because it's cool

I intend to blog through the event, WiFi permitting!