You couldn’t make it to the Mobile World Congress this year? Here is why your fear of missing out is understandable.
Contrary to many other Spanish towns, you won’t be lost in translation in Barcelona. Most of the people are speaking English and you won’t have problems to find out towards what direction is Park Güell or what’s in that tapas. It’s not the right place if you want to watch a spanish corrida. They are doing significantly better in economic terms than the rest of Spain, giving together with Catalonia, the region around it, 20% of the country’s budget and receiving back only 8%. Most people are proud speakers of Catalan, a language coexisting with Spanish and even Google will tell you if you begin to enter in its search box “Barcelona is not” that
Barcelona is not Spain.
If searching in Europe, you can’t go more San Francisco than Barcelona. The Mediterranean climate, the beaches, the cheap to rent electric bikes, the stress-free lifestyle and even the attitude of Catalans towards independence from Spain resembles the “California is not America” you hear all the time. No fewer than 74% of its citizens are using a smartphone and technology has big fans at the government level. All this couldn’t get unnoticed and Barcelona is one of the most internationally-minded cities in Europe with a big community of expats living and working here. They have the climate of Silicon Valley, its cultural diversity, the passion for technology but let’s be straight.
Catalonia is not Silicon Valley.
Just try to name a big technology company. Or look on a list of startups that are trying to make it big from here. At least for now, Catalonia is not Silicon Valley. And that’s fine. Let aside the Jamon and the Seafood Paella, Barcelona is the capital of the mobile world. If your startup needs a telecom partnership – who doesn’t? -, Mobile World Congress is the place to go in the middle of spring. This year more than 80.000 attendees, of which many of them C-level executives, made Booking.com practically useless in the days towards 24-27 of February. €356 million were injected into the local economy by this 4 days congress. So you haven’t go there? With the help of ARIES TM, the organization that supported the presence of Das Cloud and 14 other young Romanian software companies, we can try to get you rid of that “fear of missing out MWC2014 syndrome”.
Our coverage is not like being there.
But it’s pretty close. First, get a vibe of the congress through the people that were actually at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress 2014. We’ve selected 45 tweets made by some of the visitors during the 4 days of congress. Our favourite was No11, the one with the tips. Or you can really dive into thousands of tweets. Search Twitter after the hashtag #MWC14.
You barely can stand on your feet after visiting so many stands? Watch the highlight of the congress, Mark Zuckerberg speaking about his Internet.org initiative to connect all the rest of the world. He is providing the hook, the telecom operators should pay the bill. It won’t be like having Zuckerberg explaining in front of you why he paid $19 billion to move away from the advertising money of its current model of business but you won’t have to wait for more than one hour queuing to read this article either. Just click here and you’re in.
You made up your mind about what technologies are the innovations from this year. Before you go, visit their stand one more time, exchange business cards or search the names on LinkedIn. At Emotient stand the face reading machine will catch you being tired. That was it, the Mobile World Congress of 2014.