Why we’re going to MWC

Don’t let a strike put you off. You and I are going to Mobile World Congress to celebrate the sheer splendour of human endeavour when married to technology.

It’s so easy to forget. The tedious and stressful business of setting up meetings – is X worth 30 minutes or more? – saps your energy.

But MWC still remains the only trade show I can think of where four days is simply not enough.

An enduring enigma
A recent trip to a 19^th century Gothic estate put everything back into perspective. North of London, Bletchley Park once housed an 8,000-strong team of British and Polish cryptologists. Through painstaking manual effort and mathematical geniuses like Alan Turing, they cracked codes.

One of their finest efforts was the bombe, a mechanical calculating beast, designed to defeat the Enigma encryption machine – itself a magnificent example of German engineering.

Enigma smartphone app and the bombe

There’s an app for it
A working bombe is still in operation. Maintenance now takes rather fewer people: They’ve got better tools. Indeed, as a demonstrator showed me, they’re calibrating the bombe with an Enigma app on a smartphone.

It’s a small, yet potent example of how far we’ve come. Today’s technology isn’t made for an elite. The tools we’ll see at MWC, both at the official show and unofficial events – do check out the Heroes of the Mobile Fringe Festival – can empower millions.

That’s why we are slogging it over to Barca: To celebrate the genius now in everyone’s hands.