Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube are a powerful but largely unseen presence at the 3GSM World Congress.

These companies are constantly talked about at the trade show. Nokia announced a deal to put YouTube videos on its handsets; Vodafone announced an advertising tie-up with Yahoo, having announced a brace of web alliances in the run-up to the show.

In his keynote speech, Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone urged the telecoms industry to adopt the speed of the internet companies, pointing out that it took YouTube just 18 months to reach 20m users, while it had taken the mobile industry a decade to do the same.

The physical presence of these companies at the show, however, does not match the talk. You would expect these brands to have large, centrally-located stands, matching the towering edifices put up by companies like Nokia and Samsung.

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The theme of this year’s 3GSM World Congress was summarised by Naguib Sawiris, chairman and chief executive of Orascom, the Egyptian mobile phone operator, at the first keynote session of the conference.

"This is the time of the emerging markets to come back. Just look at us. We have two Indians and an Egyptian on stage," he said.

Indeed, a packed auditorium of telecoms executives were hanging on the every word of a powerful "emerging markets" trio of Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone, Sanjiv Ahuja, chief executive of Orange and Mr Sawiris, whose Orascom has a strong grip not only in the Middle East but recently acquired operators in Italy and Greece as well.

Mr Sarin was looking triumphant after clinching a deal earlier this week to buy Hutchison Essar, the fourth largest mobile operator in India.

Mr Sarin was waxing lyrical about the possibilities of India, where mobile penetration of just 13 per cent today is expected to rise to 40 per cent within the next few years, creating a potential subscriber base of around 550m people.

Also on the panel was Sanjiv Ahuja, chief executive of Orange, who, while not embarking on the same kinds of foreign adventures as Vodafone, spoke of Orange’s recently launched operations in Senegal.

Europe is now a slow-growing market. Figures out on Tuesday from GfK, the research company, showed that Europe now had 210m mobile phone users, but numbers had only grown 5 per cent in 2006. Naturally emerging markets are more exciting.

A number of announcements at 3GSM have been for products targeted at these markets. Texas Instruments is creating lower-cost chips for the market, and Motorola’s chief technology officer, Padmasree Warrior, told the Financial Times that the company was targeting developing countries with a number of products, such as solar-powered base stations suited to inaccessible areas and a new ultra-low cost phone designed to bring people who had never before made a mobile phone call into the wireless world.

But the developing markets can be as brutal as they are tempting. Motorola had a poor fourth quarter, partly due to being hit by price competition in emerging markets. Motorola’s Ms Warrior, believes the land grab is temporary phenomenon, and that eventually sleek designs - such as the z8 slider phone the company launched yesterday - will begin to move up price points. There is no guidance, however, on when this will happen.

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The sixth season of Fox’s hugely successful American Idol TV show is underway, with the contest proper starting tonight in Hollywood where 24 semi-finalists will be chosen.

This follows a month of televised auditions, notable for some extraordinary examples of awful singing, ridiculous dance routines and laughable costumes.

Much like your average karaoke bar, you might think, and Fox could have saved a lot of money touring the country by using instead kSolo, the online karaoke service it bought last year, to weed out the most entertaining singers.

It has yet to integrate kSolo into American Idol and one wonders what Electronic Arts will do with San Francisco-based SingShot Media, another online karaoke service that it announced it was acquiring yesterday.

SingShot will be part of The Sims division and EA said its technology and user-generated content would be applied to several different community projects within the company.

Video game publishers clearly want to extend into the online world and also see big money in titles that allow gamers to act out fantasies beyond being marines, space warriors, speedsters or sportsmen.

Activision’s acquisition of the company that makes Guitar Hero, the ideal game for air guitarists, helped it to a record holiday quarter. The consoles already have Sony’s SingStar karaoke game and Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution and Karaoke Revolution for hoofers and crooners.

Sales of music and dance games made up less than 5 per cent of the US market in 2006, according to NPD, but they rose 80 per cent on the previous year.

Maps are very much on the mind of the delegates trying to navigate their way around the eight cavernous exhibition halls at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. They are also on the mind of many of the companies exhibiting at the show.

Vodafone yesterday announced a deal with Google the internet company’s maps on mobile phones. The two companies are planning to create location-based services around Google Maps, so that if you type in the word "pizza" you will be shown directions to your local eateries rather than, say links for restaurants in  Rome.

Nokia too is mapping out its future with the launch on Monday  of the 6110 Navigator phone. The handset is equipped with GPS, and will come with pre-installed local maps. Additional maps can be loaded from Nokia Map Manager, a service the companies launched just last week.

This is all bad news for existing makers of portable navigation devices, such as TomTom. Sales of these devices have more than doubled to 15m in the past year as prices have come down. But now the mobile industry may be coming to spoil the party before it has properly started.

It is good news, however, for 3GSM attendees. Perhaps next year we will have a special mobile phone map of the Congress site and there will be less despair in trying to find mystery locations like Hall 4 level 7 HS59.

Nokia and Siemens put on a great show of unity in Barcelona at the first press conference of their soon-to-be-born networks joint venture. The partners in the €20bn equal JV were housed in a single stand in the exhibition hall, under their new logo, where the Nokia blue and Siemens yellow blend harmoniously into one.

There was little mention of the bribery scandal [subscription link] at Siemens which has already pushed the launch of the joint venture from January to March.

“The fact that we are here in Barcelona under one stand shows our confidence in this deal gong through,” said Simon Beresford-Wylie, chief executive-designate of the unit, when asked about the ongoing investigation.

Mr Beresford-Wylie is not expecting any more slippage on timing, insisting that the deal will close in the first quarter.

He is also bullish on the market opportunities for the venture. With broadband internet access spreading and people connecting to the internet via mobile phone, Mr Beresford-Wylie expects some 5bn people to be internet connected by 2015. At the same time, traffic over the net will have increased 100-fold. This all means there are new networks to be built.

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Price cuts were a key theme on the first day of the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.

Nokia, the word’s largest handset producers, launched a TV-enabled mobile handset at a mid-market price, a move it hopes will stimulate growth of the mobile TV sector. At around €370 before tax and operator subsidy, compared with €600 for Nokia’s previous N92 TV-phone, it is priced for the mass market.

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia, said the mobile TV market would start to build rapidly, with 5m to 10m units sold globally in 2008, growing to 20m in 2009.

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The internet is preparing itself for the onslaught of new web-enbled mobile phones, the uptake of internet television and an increasing number of phone calls made online.

The latest sign was Verisign’s announcement last week  that it would spend more than $100m to increase its capacity 10-fold over the next three years.

Verisign, which runs the .com and .net domain names and directs internet traffic at two of the 13 ‘root’ servers that direct the world’s internet traffic, said it had had a "wake-up call" on capacity needs.

Industry forecasts estimate that global internet users will nearly double to 1.8bn by 2010. Much of this will come from the world’s 2bn mobile phone users buying internet-enabled phones. In countries like India and China, the mobile phone may be the primary way to access the internet.

In addition, households will be increasingly hooking up their TVs and home phones to the internet.

All this creates more traffic for Verisign to deal with. Each time anyone clicks on a .com or a .net website or checks email, that is another query for Verisign’s DNS servers to handle. But now, in addition to just individuals sending queries, the servers will be handling traffic each time someone changes channel on internet TV, or makes a voice over IP call.

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  Whatever’s going on over in Google’s radio advertising business, the departure of the Steelberg brothers (reported here by Paidcontent.org) is not a good sign.

It’s only a year since Google bought their nascent radio advertising network, dMarc, and they had a billion reasons to stay. Well, $1.136bn to be precise: that is the size of the staged "earn-out" that Google will pay if dMarc meets certain targets by the end of 2008. They may still get to collect the dough, but Chad and Ryan Steelberg will no longer be around in person to make sure their investment pays off.

Also, it’s only a few weeks since Ryan gave a round of interviews (likes this one on Cnet) about the new, enlarged Google radio network he was running - surely a sign that there was every intention at that time that he and older brother Chad would be around to finish what they started. Something seems to have gone amiss.

(For the record, Google will say only that it is "committed to the radio business" and "happy with the progress to date" of its radio ad trials.)

The latest quest to create a European search engine rival to Google got underway this week as 13 European companies and research institutes met in Rome to kick off the Pharos project. Among them were names like France Telecom, Circom, the body representing more than 300 of Europe’s regional broadcasters and  Fast, the Norwegian search software company, as well as Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute. The meeting comes only weeks after Europe’s previous attempt at search came apart at the seams. The "Quaero" project was launched last year by the French and German governments explicitly to create a challenger to Google, but just before Christmas the Germans pulled out because of disagreements over the scope of the project. The Germans, who wanted to focus on text-based search, are now pursuing their own "Theseus" project while the French continue with picture-based Quaero. Into this mix wades Pharos, armed with another classical name and €8.5m in funding from the European Commission.

This time there is less hubris. The project partners are very nervous of saying that they are looking for a “Eurogoogle”.

They are at pains to point out that the area of audiovisual search is still wide open for research work. Google’s keyword-based algorithms don’t work particularly well here and Circom at least has a very genuine interest in finding some technology to help it catalogue its vast libraries of TV footage, without millions of man-hours spent manually tagging films.

But there is also some quiet defiance.

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Diane Greene is probably the most important woman in Silicon Valley you never heard of. That is about to change.

VMware, the virtualisation software company she and husband Mendel Rosenblum set up in 1998, has been operating under the wing of EMC for the past four years. Its reemergence later this year through a proposed IPO (though EMC will keep 90 pc of the stock, at least for the time being) will probably put Ms Greene at the helm of one of the world’s ten biggest software companies, measured by market value. (Citigroup’s back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests an $8bn market cap, while Goldman comes up with more than $12bn.)

When she dropped by the FT’s office in San Francisco a while ago, Ms Greene showed she was nothing if not ambitious. This is her on the impact of virtualisation (which lets you carve up a single piece of hardware into a number of "virtual machines", or to spread a computing task seamlessly among a number of devices):

You can take storage arrays and server racks and routers and it all just becomes hardware. It’s an incredible point in time when the industry could fundamentally change… This is a chance to have a really open industry.

One implication of this: the virtualisation software (known as a hypervisor) would become a new, horizontal platform on which applications run, pushing the individual machine’s operating system down to a less significant position. That must go down like a lead balloon at Microsoft.

Ms Greene let on that Microsoft tried at one stage to buy her company but couldn’t agree terms, so it bought Connectix instead (Microsoft now has its own virtualisation product but, surprise, surprise, it only runs on Windows.) Fulfilling the real promise of virtualisation, says the VMware founder, will require technology standards that let any hypervisor run on any operating system.

This is yet another area, it seems, where Microsoft’s new committment to interoperability and open standards (see here and here) will be put to the test.