As the mobile industry continues to grow, new opportunities open up for collaboration with the European space industry. Michel Bosco from European Commission, Head of Application Development for the Galileo and EGNOS programs, was present at Mobile World Congress explaining the mobile developers what are the upcoming challenges and opportunities brought by Galileo & EGNOS.

Mobile World Congress is the world's largest mobile event. Historically it has been the place where the entire mobile industry has met, from chipset vendors to antenna manufacturer, from mobile operators to mobile individual developers. However in the last few years the scene has evolved quite dramatically as mobile technologies are disrupting multiple industries. 2013 was the year of the cars. Numerous vendors were present, also industry associations and consortia looking at connected cars, car entertainment, smart cities & smart transport.

While the automotive industry has been a strong adopter of positioning and navigation technologies this Mobile World Congress has also demonstrated a strong demand for positioning in the mobile advertising industry. Multiple players were touting solutions for location based advertising aimed at offering more contextually relevant offers. The growing importance of location based advertising however calls for improved indoor positioning and navigation with a few vendors demonstrating solutions based on multi-signal positioning.

Above all the main change at Mobile World Congress is the growing importance of software over hardware, of internet entrepreneurs and mobile developers over traditional players. This was particularly obvious in the Apps Planet part of the event with developers swarming the various Application Developer Conferences. One of these events WIPjam, , has been in existence for 6 years, always demonstrating and supporting innovation in the mobile software sector. This year it attracted over 1300 developer for a day of presentations, workshops, demos, hacking and networking. More than 20 companies were sponsoring the event with some of the biggest names in technology and mobile present alongside GSA. EGNOS SDK has attracted a lot of attention of the developers, willing to test the improved accuracy provided by EGNOS corrections.

Michel Bosco addressed a room of developers at WIPjam asking them to keep an eye on the development around EGNOS and Galileo.

"Location Based Services are expected to grow at high rate in the coming years and users are becoming more demanding, requiring better performance in terms of accuracy and smooth transition from outdoor to indoor location. Use of Galileo and GPS together will bring better performance, especially in urban environments."

As the EGNOS and Galileo value proposition matures events like MWC will be key networking tool for the adoption of the technologies and for the EC to support mobile innovation in Europe.