Moscow calling

I'm preparing to travel to Moscow - now on BMI rather than BA (and working out how to cope with a far lower baggage allowance!). I will be taking part in the Digital TV Russia symposium which AIB has agreed to support, as well as meeting a range of broadcasters and others involved in the media scene in Russia.

It's definitely a trip I'm looking forward to as I have not been to Moscow before. I will have to find some time to do the tourist stuff of Red Square and have a go on the metro.

You will be able to read my paper on the AIB website from 1200GMT on Monday 22 March.

I'm also going to be trying out new presentation software that I saw in action earlier this week at the Social TV Forum. Paul Bristow, VP Strategy at Swiss-based ADB, makes use of Prezi and I was very impressed. I'm experimenting with it at the moment and will be using it for real for the first time in Moscow on Monday. Wish me luck!

BA - just what do the initials stand for?

I'm a bit disgruntled. Having learnt that the flight I am due to travel to Moscow is one of the ones that is apparently not surviving the British Airways cabin crew strike, I rang BA to try and get on to an earlier flight that is still going.

I waited, listening to the same 20 bars of music and same announcements saying how wonderful BA is, for more than two and a half hours. And then...I was cut off. I should have known that would happen.

Now it's impossible to get through - the message "we're experiencing extremely high call volumes" is the only thing you can get at the moment.

At this rate, getting to Moscow could prove challenging. Is it time to switch allegiance from OneWorld to Star Alliance of SkyTeam?

Al Jazeera Forum underway in Doha

I'm in Doha at the moment for the fourth Al Jazeera Forum - an invitation-only meeting of academics, journalists and observers from the Middle East and around the world. Delegates here from the US, UK, Malaysia, a raft of North African countries and a good many other places.

Wadah Khanfar has opened the event, and the keynote speaker was Seymour Hersh. Should be an interesting couple of days - more follows!

In the meantime, I thought I'd pass on a Blackberry tip - if you use your Crackberry for web browsing, ditch the bundled browser and download Opera Mini. I did this while my BA flight to Doha was on the ground in Bahrain and have been using it ever since. I have to say it's a revelation with pages rendered far more rapidly and far easier navigation. Just one grumble - for some reason I can't get the "update" button on Twitter to work when using Opera Mini, although Blackberry's own browser carries out this function OK. Strange...

Not much of a recession in mobile

Judging by the flight traffic into Barcelona over the weekend, and the proportion of BA planes given over to business class (more than 50% on the flight I took out of London Gatwick on Sunday), the recession has passed the mobile industry by.

Lots of activity here in Barcelona as Mobile World Congress gets underway this Monday morning, although the queues to get into the Fira weren't as bad as last year.

Good to see that AIB member France 24 is here, on a corner of the Actimagine stand in hall 2. Vizrt is also here, in hall 7 and DW on the NRW stand in hall 2.