Senior company executives, purchasing directors or those responsible for the technological field are usually the visitors who come to Barcelona year after year to soak up the technological innovations at the MWC. Thanks to a new initiative dubbed Talent Arena, which debuts in this 2024 edition, the great congress seeks to seduce new audiences. “We want to attract experts such as programmers, data analysts, specialists in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity or semiconductors,” says Jordi Arrufí, director of corporate development and digital talent at MWCapital, which promotes the initiative with the collaboration of Barcelona City Council, the Generalitat of Catalonia, the GSMA and with Grupo CaixaBank as main partner. The new space will offer a program with 14 presentations and 31 speakers, a hackathon, an exhibition space, workshops and will also have a second life outside the walls of Fira de Barcelona's Gran Via venue through the broadcast of 12 hours of live streaming.
Beyond the managerial profiles, Arrufí comments that “many events also have content for specialized professionals.” That is the new attraction that the MWC Talent Arena will offer, which will last from February 26 to the 29th, or in other words, throughout the entire congress. “We are going to offer added value so that the workers of the companies that attend broaden their horizons,” hopes Víctor Solanas, one of those responsible for making the Talent Arena a reality with the declared objective of gathering talent so that its value is multiplied.
In the area of presentations, the new MWC space will bring together the “knowledge of national and international experts”, according to Jordi Arrufí. Some of the speakers at the Talent Arena will be David Cuartielles, co-founder of Arduino; Andrés Torrubia, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Institute; Carlos Villavieja, software engineer at Google; Xavier Amastrain, VP of Engineering at LinkedIn, and Xavier Noria, Ruby on Rails core member.
The location of the new Talent Arena will be privileged: 1,500 m2 in Hall 3, the most sought-after, where the main manufacturers are located. “In the middle of the MWC,” Arrufí describes. About 3,000 people are expected to participate in the first edition of the space. The schedule will be tight: “We are going to have constant activity every day, it is going to be non-stop,” he remarks.
Without a doubt, one of the most intense activities that will be carried out in the Talent Arena is the hackathon, a multidisciplinary meeting of professionals to develop a technological improvement in the form of a marathon. It will be held on February 27 and 28 with the participation of 48 people divided into 12 different teams that will bring together four different professional profiles in each one.
The challenge posed is to generate use cases with the Open Gateway API to disseminate this technology among the developer community, devise proofs of concept that can be used in the market and promote the connection between programmers and other technical profiles. APIs are fundamental protocols in the development of websites and applications. With the appearance of Open Gateway, promoted by the GSMA, standards are unified, facilitating the work of developers and opening multiple opportunities. The different teams will be “multidisciplinary” and will be made up of people who do not know each other. “Barriers will be broken, generating synergies,” considers Solanas.
The Talent Arena is not born out of nowhere, but is born from the work of MWCapital to promote the generation of local digital talent and the attraction of international digital talent. In 2024 it will be six years since MWCapital generates projects to accompany talent and promote digital training both for professionals who aspire to improve their digital skills and for those who want to change sectors and enter the digital world. In this line, the Jump2Digital event stands out, which last year reached its third edition. The fair promoted by MWCapital connects the different vertices of Barcelona's digital talent ecosystem, bringing together emerging companies, large companies, talented developers, content creators and aspiring to enter the sector who do not meet regularly. In 2023 it brought together more than 7,000 people, which consolidates it as a true reference event in southern Europe in terms of digital talent.
