Discovering disruption at the MWC25 mobile world congress – News

I was one of 109,000 attendees at the MWC25 mobile world congress in Barcelona this week, looking to uncover the most interesting enterprise technology vendors among the nearly 2,900 exhibitors in the massive Fira convention center.

As you might expect, everybody had some kind of artificial intelligence story. But of the 32 companies I interviewed, only a handful were leveraging AI or other technologies with the intention of disrupting their respective markets.

Among the most interesting: young startups still in the proof-of-concept phase, still trying to work out the details of their offerings.

Other more mature vendors have achieved some measure of customer traction – but their innovations are nevertheless driving disruption across the information technology landscape.

Here are my choices among the thousands of contenders:

The startups with disruption in their sights

The audacity and ambition of six early-stage vendors stood out from the crowd. Whether each vendor’s respective technology will work as advertised is still an open question. All we can do is take their word for it.

Aerendir Mobile Inc. uses micro-vibrations in handheld devices to create a biometric signature that represents the brain patterns of the person holding the device. This signature can uniquely identify the person (as with other biometric technologies), but it can also identify the age of the person as well as her pregnancy and ovulation status.

It’s not clear that the world needs another biometric technology. I also wonder if the information it can glean will be too invasive for broad adoption. The company claims to be focused on privacy, but this technology could be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Aima beyond artificial intelligence S.L. offers a realistic, AI-driven human-like avatar that can carry on conversations and learn about individual users. Like other similar products, it uses generative AI to create responses and can incorporate sentiment analysis for realistic interactions. Where Aima stands out is its empathetic engine that supports richer emotional interactions for elder care and mental health use cases.

Most of the similar avatar technologies coming to market center on on customer service. Aima stands out with its focus on mental health. This market niche is unquestionably smaller but aligns with the company’s altruistic motivations.

Always Connect AI (ClickNow Technologies Ltd.) leverages generative AI to predict the next message on any network across text, audio and video data types. With this prediction, network operators can improve all important network KPIs, including latency, jitter and throughput.

Given how important network quality is for both consumer and business applications, leveraging Always Connect is a “no brainer” for enterprises and telcos alike.

Capzul Corp. is reinventing network security by securing endpoints so that they do not appear on the network, thus eliminating the network attack surface. The vendor offers anti-reverse-engineering technology as well as a proprietary network communication protocol and secure network nodes that only allow traffic that conforms to this protocol.

Capzul’s approach is too opaque to establish just how disruptive the technology might be. Other technologies on the market can hide network endpoints, and encrypted protocols are nothing new, either. I’m looking forward to learning whether Capzul is as disruptive as its executives believe it to be.

HyperFlow from Mirinae Technologies Inc. is a no-code platform for building AI agents and advanced retrieval-augmented generation solutions via a graph-based IDE that supports sophisticated AI use cases.

I have seen several other no-code AI development tools, but HyperFlow has the slickest, most complete interface. It also shows a level of sophistication that similar products don’t exhibit.

Wiliot Ltd. has squeezed a four-core Arm processor into a flexible sticker about three centimeters long it calls a “pixel.” This processor is powered by ambient Wi-fi and Bluetooth signals and continually broadcasts encrypted data via Bluetooth. The goal is to replace RFID tags primarily within the supply chain and retail industries.

Wiliot has open-sourced its technology in hopes of fostering a global community that will drive its adoption. The company’s business model centers on the back-end infrastructure that can support the deployment of vast numbers of pixels.

Disruptions in the market today

Four of the disruptors that made my list are currently in the market with their offerings, each targeting a different market segment.

Hailo Technologies Ltd. is disrupting the GPU market with its AI chips designed specifically for neural networks. The chips leverage a new compute architecture that provides a performance and power footprint that makes the chips ideal for edge use cases like cameras.

AI inferencing on the edge is becoming increasingly important for data-intensive use cases such as video. Video surveillance is an early example, but this technology is suitable for drones and other technologies that place AI at the edge.

MATRIXX Software Inc. is disrupting the legacy telco billing market with its dynamic billing software that enables telco service providers to offer flexible billing and payment for the wide variety of phone-based applications and services that both consumers and businesses enjoy.

This software can support pay-as-you-go services, one-off purchases, subscriptions and essentially any other billing and payment requirement that a mobile service provider might have.

Neuron Soundware (NeuronSW SE) is disrupting the IoT device management market with technology that listens to machines. The company uses AI to process sound information to identify problems with any type of equipment, often reporting on maintenance issues well before equipment failure.

The range of types of equipment that can take advantage of Neuron Soundware’s technology is surprisingly broad, from aircraft engines to factory equipment to retail store technology. Any equipment with moving parts will make noise, and anomalous sound usually indicates a maintenance problem.

Zero Error (SalqTech LLC) is disrupting the data quality tooling market by extending the concept of data quality to the business context. Where most data quality tools deal with formatting and syntax issues, Zero Error uses AI to identify anomalous data in context.

For example, if an invoice lists items including their weight, and a particular item has an anomalous weight value, then Zero Error can flag the anomaly. Zero Error can also catch metric vs. US measurements, say when a value is in inches when it’s supposed to be in centimeters. It is also useful for identifying fraud via anomalies in the data.

The bigger picture of disruption

AI was certainly on everybody’s tongues at MWC, and several of the vendors on my list have AI-related offerings. However, only two – Mirinae and Hailo – are rolling out products that hope to disrupt the AI marketplace itself.

All the other examples of AI-related businesses are leveraging AI to create disruption in a diverse set of markets.

This shift from “AI for AI’s sake” to “AI for business value” is an important sign that AI as a set of technologies is gradually maturing. Nevertheless, given the early stages many of these vendors find themselves in, there is plenty of growth remaining.

It’s also important to note that AI is not the whole story. Network security, RFID and telco billing are also ripe for disruption – just a few examples from the thousands of stories of disruption among the companies represented at MWC.

Jason Bloomberg is founder and managing director of Intellyx, which advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for News. None of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer.

Photo: MWC