At Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona, there were many new ideas centered around making your mobile life better. Some of them had the cool factor, from an interface from Swedish TAT which lets you identify a person’s face via your phone camera and deliver not only profile information about that person but also show you their latest status updates, to green mobile technology such as MyFC which makes fuels cells and chargers so you can charge any mobile or laptop, extending the battery life of your portable device.

Then we saw it. The lifestyle technology that we knew we would see in hotel rooms next. We know we will see it because for the past decade, hoteliers have been transforming their hotel rooms into more of what the guest is used to at home. From the way we search for content on TV and surf for movies, to the lighting around the bed versus the lighting around the work spaces – hotels have been creating a lifestyle experience. You see companies like Philips creating a new dynamic around mood lighting in hotel rooms, TV’s that feel like they belong in our living rooms, and Acentic which creates the technology giving you access to programming and content that parallels how we interact with our computer.

So what is this new discovery that  completes the lifestyle experience of the guest? The furniture. Now if you combine the furniture with our busy mobile lifestyles and the hectic pace of the business traveller then the lifestyle technology we saw at Mobile World Congress is just what hoteliers will be doing next. A Finnish company, Powerkiss www.powerkiss.com has said goodbye to the cables that go along with charging your portable devices including mobile phones. Their solution – work with furniture manufacturers and imbed a charging device into the furniture. All the guest has to do is attach  a pin into the device and place it on the furniture with the device built in and the mobile phone charges automatically. No more need for cables or for adaptors that don’t work anyway.

Technology has moved away from just code and software to practical applications that make your life better in a more direct way when you are away from home. 

 Guest blogger: Jennifer Hicks, Founder , ink Communications, marketing consultant, Acentic