Prominent keynote speakers named for the 2013 Mobile World Congress next week

An interesting line-up of keynote speakers has been named for one of the largest annual industry events in the mobile phone industry, the Mobile World Congress, which is set to kick off in Barcelona next week.

This year’s event will start with a number of key press conferences on Monday (local time), including Sony and Chinese smartphone giant ZTE.

The event has also rounded up a number of high profile keynote speakers, including Mozilla’s chairman Mitchell Baker and chief executive Gary Kovacs.

Mozilla is best known as the developer of the Firefox web browser, although it has also announced it is working on developing a smartphone platform called Firefox Mobile OS.

Jolla chief executive Marc Dillon, who heads a start-up continuing development on Nokia’s now-abandoned MeeGo platform, is set to deliver a speech at MWC, along with the current Nokia chief executive, Stephen Elop.

Another speech many in the industry are sure to follow closely will be delivered by Xi Guohua, chairman of the world’s largest mobile phone carrier China Mobile, who has recently held talks with Apple chief executive Tim Cook about making the iPhone available to the carrier’s 700 million subscribers.

Representatives from major carriers will also be well represented among the keynote speakers, including representatives from AT&T, Telecom Italia, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, NTT DOCOMO and Vodafone.

The conference runs from February 25 to 28 in Barcelona, Spain.