Mobile World Congress - for a show dedicated to all things mobile, it sure does make me want to go home and be as immobile as possible.

Spread over the massive Fira halls in Barcelona - as well as a few outlying hotels - Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM, aka Hell) really must be the entire world of all things mobile. It’s ridiculously huge. And packed. Thousands of people with freebie-laden, logo-emblazoned bags shoulder past each other, squeezing around stands of shiny new phones and all the tech that backs them.

As a journalist, it’s a painful experience. I arrived in sunny Barca early this morning (via EasyJet, so imagine my mood — not so sunny) and by the time I cabbed my way to the show, the place was teeming.

Elbowing my way through the aforementioned crowds, I had to leg it from the press registrations to my first press conference, then leg it across a few halls and up some ramps to a briefing, before legging it out of the venue and across a big traffic circle to the Microsoft annoucements, afterwhich I had to leg it back to one of the main halls for another pair of meetings. This is no easy feat - not least because I have rather short legs.

Sure, I got to see a lot in a short span, but it seems a hard way to get things done. So I pose a question to all you IT and industry folks: what exactly do you manage to get done at these shows? Is it worth braving the crowds to get some knowledge and cut some deals, or is it all just a massive waste of time (and company expense accounts)?

Your thoughts in the comments, or drop us a line via the IT PRO Facebook page.

Last month, I wrote a feature about a school in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and how they’re using technology to teach local girls real skills to get real jobs.Achieving such at thing is no easy feat, to underestimate wildly. But the effort is well worth it. Economically, it’s added a major boost to the area. The Afghan Canadian Community Center’s students go on to work for NGOs and aid bodies who would have had to import staff - now the local area gets an influx of foreign money, the girls get proper jobs, and the organisations get the benefit of employees with local knowledge.

Not only that, these students are creating a future for themselves and creating a new Afghanistan - one with educated, technology-saavy women ready to lead it. S

Myself and Ryan at the fundraising group Afghan School Project would like to thank everyone for their help; the money donated is doing some very, very good work. While each and every donation put a smile on my face - and helped the school reach it’s goal - one donation was so exceptional it deserves to be highlighted.

The campaign was set to end on December 31, a date we’d arbitrarily chosen. The day before, I went online to our fundraising site ChipIn to see how things were going. We were short, quite significantly so. I was really dissapointed we hadn’t raised the full amount, I’ve got to say. Such a worthy project, asking for so little, with such measurable results - who could say no?

So I went back to the ChipIn site, to extend the deadline. But where the “amount raised” had previously said 45 per cent, it now read 100 per cent. My first reaction was that the site had a bug. But no - there in the list of donators was a new name: Brendan Choi. And next to his name, the donation amount, totalling the exact difference between what we had and what we needed.Tears in my eyes and a massive grin on my face, I frantically called Ryan with the good news. He contacted Brendan, an IT worker in the US, who gave us a bit of insight into why he had been so incredibly generous.  “I was looking for ways to help the people of southern Afghanistan. I went on the internet and researched aid efforts in the region. It was not hard to find the Afghan Canadian Community Center in Kandahar. The ACCC was exactly the kind of institution I was looking for,” he wrote.