With February just beginning, the mobile world is gearing up for Mobile World Congress (MWC), which will be taking place in Barcelona, at the end of the month. It’ll certainly be interesting to see what new products and features will be announced at the show. From the ongoing trends (some of which Mike Amundsen recently discussed), I’d expect to see a number of announcements of IoT products.

The good old measure of progress, mobile subscriber penetration, doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, the real measure is how many other connected devices a subscriber uses – iPads, Smart TVs and even fridges (who wouldn’t want a Galaxy Kitchen or an iPad Mini?) This is just the start of a revolution in connectivity, which will make it easier than ever to consume information and equally easy to emit a lot of information, often through social networks.

But there is another aspect to this – not only will you be able to post your own information but there will be all kinds of devices that can “sense” information about you. I expect to see a lot of this at MWC – sensors and cameras scattered around the floor, mapping passers-by to Facebook profiles and other personal information. Obviously, the capturing and cross pollination of this information raises all sorts of privacy issues.

It will also have a number of significant ramifications for mobile developers. First, there will be a new wealth of information available in the form of Web service APIs, as most of the data will be stored in cloud. The sheer scale of this new information-rich world will require apps to leverage cloud processing capabilities in order to be truly effective. This will create opportunities for enterprises to rethink their mobile architectures.

Second, mobile developers will need to use standard protocols for authentication and authorization. OAuth and OpenID Connect are key standards for protecting resources and allowing app users to authorize apps to leverage their information. Will these standards address all the privacy issues mentioned above? Probably not but they will make it a good deal easier for app developers to comply with privacy laws and regulations.

Third, the most successful app developers will be those that are able to provide a seamless user experience (UX) across multiple devices. This is because the end user of the near future will naturally expect all apps to know about other sessions that user had with an app across all of his or her many smart devices. Devs will therefore want to migrate sessions across devices, to bolster the UX.

If you’re going to MWC, come and say hello to the Layer 7 team. We will be located in the App Planet area Hall: 8.1 Booth: A47. I hope to see you there!

Simple answer: no. But if you’re a developer building the next great consumer app in a hurry, it probably won’t hurt. MBaaS (“mobile backend as a service”) solves some pretty prickly problems for the start-up developer. MBaaS offerings like Appcelerator, CloudMine, FeedHenry and StackMob deliver the basic components for storage, messaging, notification, user management and so forth that mobile developers need, making it easy for developers to set up and operate the backend for their applications.

But let’s say you’re not a bad-ass consumer app developer. Imagine you’re a mild-mannered enterprise dev looking to make a solid app for your field sales organization. What does MBaaS do for you? Maybe the right question is what does MBaaS not do for you? Answer: it doesn’t get you access to the one thing you need as an enterprise developer – enterprise data.

Enterprise apps need data like plants need sunlight. It could be customer records, documentation, pricing information, inventory levels or a myriad other things. But that data is stuck in the enterprise, inside of SAP this and SharePoint that and database the other. No amount of simplifying interactions with AWS will get that information into your hands to build the super-compelling apps employees need access to.

Enter mobile middleware like Layer 7’s SecureSpan Mobile Access Gateway. Getting the stuff that’s locked inside the enterprise into the hands of devs is a middleware problem. It’s about information sharing. It’s about opening up but in a very targeted manner. MBaaS has some great ideas for making a mobile developer’s life easier. Enterprise devs want the same benefits but with the added benefit of access to enterprise data. I joined Layer 7 from a prior gig at RIM to help that happen. Stay tuned for details.