Wireless industry players place their bets on the future during the four-day Mobile World Congress opening Monday in Barcelona, laying stakes on the next big thing with new product launches, services and alliances.

Is wireless broadband beamed into your home in the future? Will advertisers be invading your mobile phone with location-based advertising? precisely how personalized will your mobile phone become and is the date ripe for the Internet’s migration into your handset?

While more than 50,000 industry officials from major cell phone makers, telecoms companies and high-technology firms stake out their next move at the world’s largest communications conference, the winners ultimately will be decided by consumers.

“One thing is to come out with an announcement. The next is to deliver. At the end of the day, the user decides who is the winner and who is the loser. The winner is the one who can give the best experience,” said John Strand of Copenhagen, Denmark-based Strand

Strand says the hot topic at that year’s conference will be mobile broadband, which already is taking off in countries like Sweden, Finland and Austria. The technology has the virtues of delivering high-speed Net to areas where there aren’t existing cable networks or where the network quality is poor, but Strand said the success will be in the pricing.

Major cell phone makers including Finland’s Nokia, the U.S. company Motorola and Samsung and LG of South Korea will be on hand, along with telephone operators looking for new services — from music players to instant messaging — that will help them recoup the millions invested in third-generation cell phone technology.

As the World Wide Web migrates to the cell phone, some of the biggest players will be companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. They are looking to expand into the 3 billion cell phones worldwide — roughly three times…

Orginal post by Top Tech News