The Mobile World Congress 2014 took place in the last week of February in Barcelona, and it is one of the most significant events in the mobile industry. JAL21 was there in its second year (first with our own booth) as a vibrant Consulting and Business Development firm, and presenting one of its startup investments – BiGuud (see www.biguud.com). These four days have been extremely busy and exciting, filled with meetings, conferences, discussion panels and many random encounters. We have been scouting actively to find the best technologies to partner with and the pool of opportunities is more than abundant.

The first day started off very intensively. Even the Prince of Spain who is a big supporter of Spanish entrepreneurs paid us a visit at the stand. The Secretary of State of Telecomunications in Spain, Mr. Victor Calvo Sotelo, also stopped by and Juan A. Latasa was able to explain to him about JAL21 business and our new venture capital initiative with other investors, SwanLaab (www.swanlaab.com).

The mobile industry is flourishing, especially in the areas of M2M, Internet of things, Video streaming, Device Management systems, Cloud solutions, which confirms that we are on the right track being focused on those technologies.

It is remarkable that among the approximately 2000 exhibitors there is a very vivid and uneven differentiation – about 10 of them are the buyers and the rest are those whose main goal in business is to sell to the big 10…  Everybody in the industry knows who are the big 10 buyers – the biggest operators: Telefonica, Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon, Orange, etc. The fight for merely arranging a meeting with one of them is really fierce. So, if you want to have advantage you should consider partnering up with JAL21.

The BiGuud application, our first investment, enjoyed tremendous interest from visitors and media. You can see in the pictures attached, Joaquín Henares the founder and CEO, being interviewed by the leading Spanish radio covering MWC.

Working and indulging the Spanish way,  after a long day of work we had delicious dinner with the team and following that, a stroll around the best sights in Barcelona, like the Cathedral of Sagrada Familia, a marvellous work of faith and architechture by Gaudí.

To sum up the whole event, it has been an incredibly productive and enriching MWC for JAL21. The main challenge in our industry is to detect what will be the technology of tomorrow. We have worked hard to stay true to our mission to select the best ones.  We had a lot of promising meetings with potential partners and clients, and we look with hope the future ahead of us.