Survived Mobile World Congress 2016 ... pics to prove it ;)

Still jet lagged from MWC 2016 . Sitting back in MV, trying to parse and analyze everything that happened at MWC . 

It is a gargantuan task, considering how much is packed in a short 4 days. Throw in the jet lag on both ends of a 16 hour flight (for those of us coming from Silicon Valley out to Barcelona) . Throw in the tapas , wine, and parties. Throw in all of the exciting business opportunities, ideas, meetings, and you can't help but feel a bit like you are in the tornado of news. 

This year the show was bigger than ever, and the 2 days of metro strikes made Barcelona feel like it was bursting at the seams with 100,000 mobile professionals, hackers, geeks, executives, and media.

For Opera this is an extra exciting time. We are in the midst of having a bid by China's Electornic Arts aka Kunlun for acquisition of 100% of Opera stock . 

We also have a portfolio of products that are exploding with growth : Opera Max , Apps Club , Coast , Opera for Android, Opera Mini , Surf Easy , Opera Mobile Store , Opera TV.

Also with partners like Xiaomi and Samsung already shipping my product, Opera Max,  there were exciting press events to go to off the fira . Here is a front view (VIP seating) of Hugo launching xiaomi's Mi5 2016 flagship phone. Hugo did a great job unveiling the devices, and they are clearly going to be a strong successor to the Mi4 device which catapulated Xiaomi to 70 million Androids sold in 2015 , and 170 Million MIUI OS installed user base around the world. All of this made the show a whirlwind of meetings, new ideas , tapas , and coffee :''

However i am most proud of our work with Worldreader.org , together we won the GSMA Global Mobile Award for the Best innovation in Education and Social Change. For our joint work in getting worldreaders free mobiles webapp out to millions of readers in Africa. Opera Mini is the #1 leading browser on the African continent. Worldreader is an Non profit , 501 C , with the mission of bringing free books and literacy to every child on the planet. Worldreader mobile website is a curated catalog of about 30,000 books across a variety of languages. This is the most cost efficient way to deliver the gift of reading to those that crave it most in emerging markets in Africa , India, and Indonesia.  This is the WorldReader team and Opera folks posing for a photo with out 1st place award trophy :

The other pics in this post are screenshots of tweets with pics of meetings with Frederic from Tech Crunch , Obrien from Venture Beat,  Hakon CTO of Opera (inventor of CSS) , and shot of me next to the logo complements of Bruce Deputy CTO / HTML 5 book author.