MEF Director of Programmes James Williams met with Members and guests at MEF CONNECTS Nordics and Meetup for our first ever in-person events in Sweden. The show will be available to watch online soon, for now here James shares an overview.
Our MEF Meet Up and MEF CONNECTS Nordics events proved to mark a couple of firsts for the organisation – the first full, live MEF events in Sweden in MEF’s history and other than any MEF organised events limited to mobile operator attendance only, the first in 20+ years which had been open to all MEF members where c. 70% of all attendees came from operators. And all four operators from the host country Sweden were present and correct.
This made for a refreshing dynamic and it’s fair to say all attending really enjoyed what MEF had laid on.
I’d like to immediately express my personal gratitude to Telia Company for really stepping up and making their fantastic conference room available to us for the MEF CONNECTS Nordics event on June 1st.
Proceedings kicked off in Stockholm with a chilled but classy networking event (which MEF call a ‘Meet Up’) on the evening of May 31st at the Radisson Blu Royal Viking hotel in central Stockholm. We were able to take over their 9th floor rooftop bar for the event and were treated to lovely views and an atmosphere which really allowed all attending to get down to the business of building relationships and getting business done.
Representation from all the four mobile operators in Sweden meant that we were able to get a superb handle on how they were approaching areas such as consumer trust, CPaaS, … plans for mobile subscriber intelligence …“
So now, back to the main event on June 1st…
The eight panel discussions through the day covered practically every area of Business Messaging I can think of. Whether it’s regulation, commercial models, anti-fraud (naturally Artificially Inflated and Generated traffic figuring highly in discussions), how to truly bring CPaaS to a wider audience, a frank discussion looking at all angles of richer channels such as WhatsApp, RCS Business Messaging (RBM) and Viber and how the industry can really benefit and make money from them, changes across the world in how authentication is being done, a deep-dive into the world of mobile subscriber intelligence with a focus on opportunities for operators, we covered all this, and more.
Representation from all the four mobile operators in Sweden (3, Tele2, Telia and Telenor) meant that we were able to get a superb handle on how they were approaching areas such as consumer trust, CPaaS, how far along they were with RBM, their plans for mobile subscriber intelligence and we heard from them what they are looking for from other stakeholders to truly make all their aims a reality. Having Google in the house for the full duration of the event afforded all present the opportunity to hear from them about their plans for RBM too which added real value for many there.
As most of you already know, MEF is a neutral not-for-profit member-led organisation and our events in the real world rely on sponsorship from members to make them possible.
Only members are allowed to sponsor. So, thank you Cisco, ENEA AdaptiveMobile Security, Infobip, Messente, netnumber Global Data Services, Telia Company and XConnect for being there with me this week and truly understanding the opportunity going that extra step of sponsoring provides. Watch this space as we might just be heading back to Stockholm in 2024 too for another MEF event.
My next two stops are Messaging & SMS World in London on June 19th and 20th and then the GSMA FASG #26 meeting in Bucharest which I’ll be attending on June 27th and 28th. I look forward to catching up with many of you reading this post in person. Safe travels to all of you doing so and I hope you enjoy all the content MEF produces across so many different areas of Mobile.
And last – but absolutely, by no means least – should you be reading this and not be a MEF member but you’d like to change that, then feel free to drop me a line directly – I can definitely help you with that!
