Women entrepreneurs and mentors have had a great presence, especially at Barcelona Activa´s booth on last edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC22).
4YFN (4 Years From Now) is the show where entrepreneurs and innovative companies are displayed at Hall 6 in MWC, and it organized networking activities from February 27 to Wednesday March 2.
The MWC22 closed on Thursday, March 3, with very remarkable results because of the need of both the audience and companies to finally meet in real life, after the long pandemic virtual parenthesis.
Almost 60,000 visitors were registered, activities multiplied, innovations grew, and entrepreneurs numbers increased a great deal.
In the 'Mobile' sections for women, pitches of the most current innovations in terms of applied technology, usability, fintech, edtech, and other scheduled developments were particularly successful.
Each year the 4YFN Awards are delivered during the congress. These awards are the highest official recognition offered exclusively to startups during MWC Barcelona. And the 4YFN Awards 2022 was given to the company HumanlCare, which is dedicated to virtual medical care from home.
Women entrepreneurs at the ´Mobile´
Specially worth highlighting is the video intervention of Dr. Zina Zarrahi Cinker, general director of AMPT. Zarrahi is a world-renowned graphene expert, R&D strategist, and condensed matter physicist.
She is founder and CEO of the Advanced Material Future Preparedness Taskforce (AMPT), an international public interest organization in more than 20 countries, organizing the global use of advanced materials to solve humanity's most immediate challenges.
Zina is also the lead creator of PUZZLE X, the world's first Frontier Materials hub consisting of an annual event and 365-day company builder, uniting the worlds of Frontier Materials with the United Nations 'Sustainability Goals'.
On the other hand, Virginia Palacios, director of HP, considered Barcelona during her presentation as a highly capable city of bringing together start-ups with great potential and a wide range of professionals in fields related to engineering.
"We have the best of both worlds," she insisted, and recalled the innovations that HP has promoted from Sant Cugat del Vallès, where its 3D printing reference center is installed.
ESADE Women in Technology presented by Nuria Agell, director of the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences at ESADE, who has highlighted the existing disparity between men and women in technology companies in our country, was also very interesting and clarifying, since it continues to be extremely difficult to break the gender gap on an international scale, and only 30% of women hold managerial positions of high responsibility in business or technical management around the world.
The pitches
The presentations and debates (pitchings) organized by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya were also deep into women visibility, as well as the meeting organized by Barcelona Activa, which brought together all women mentors of the #womenmentoringprogramme, in a networking activity attended by Barcelona City Councilor Jaume Collboni.
The #womenmentoringprogramme is a special program for women entrepreneurs who want to receive advice from more experienced and consolidated businesswomen/mentors, who help them develop their small and medium-sized businesses with a greater guarantee of success.
I have been a mentor with Barcelona Activa for 3 years now, and it is an amazing experience that brings joy and knowledge to my world filled with the women in business community.
Metaverse and tokens
Among the novelties that have been presented these days at the Congress, it is worth mentioning the Digital Metaverse, which is already among us, but will surely be much more important in the future of disruptive relationships of both cultural and commercial businesses.
The NFTs (non-fungible tokens) have become visible, asserted, and understood by attendants and also by the less savvy audience on this disruptive and innovative technological field thanks to the presentations which have explained the meaning of NFTs in the Metaverse done by cutting edge technology companies at 4YFN.
“It will be like when television arrived to our lives, there will come a time when everyone will have virtual reality glasses at home and will be able to enjoy the beauties of the metaverse”, predicted the promoter of the SK Telekom stand, Paula Carreras. (*)
Mobile telephony
It is also worth mentoning the enormous evolution mobile telephony has achieved with the rapid implementation of 5G, which already allows leading global communications, and which also continues to advance towards 6G at high speed.
Many telephony brands are currently betting on folding smartphones and it seems that this bet is not a passing fad. The TCL company has presented its Fold 'n Roll model, a mobile phone with a flexible third screen that can be easily rolled and unrolled.
The Spanish mobile brand Telefónica, has targetted a holographic telepresence in addition to presenting its new terminals, while adding the use of drones in industry, and gaming ( the execution of specialized applications known as electronic games, or video games, on video game consoles).
Companies such as Orange or Telenor have also shown their new terminals that, in addition to having optimized cameras, are endowed with spectacular capabilities, difficult to foresee just a few years ago.
Mobile phones with sophisticated image processing have also been launched, including the new neural image processing unit developed by OPPO, MariSilicon X, which responds to the greatest challenge that smartphones had, in terms of video capture and night recording.
In short, the GSMA MWC positions itself once again as an essential event for the worldwide technology industry, not only because of its economic benefit to the city of Barcelona, but also because of the high quality of its international innovations, activities, speakers, and exhibitors.
Neus Flores and Julia L. Tremols