CASA SEAT in Barcelona will host on Monday, March 6, a new session of the The New Barcelona – Moments Estel·lars cycle, with Francesc Fajula, CEO of Mobile World Capital Barcelona, and Pilar Conesa, founder and CEO of Anteverti and curator of the Smart City Expo World Congress, as guests. With them, we will take stock of the 2023 edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which will have been held just a few days before and is expected to gather 80,000 visitors.
The impact that the MWC has had on the city is undeniable, turning it into an international pole of attraction and a hotbed of startups and technological centers of large international companies. This transformation is also experienced in the congress itself, where mobile terminals are increasingly less important and give way to a new digital revolution focused on virtual reality, blockchain, or artificial intelligence.
The public-private foundation led by Francesc Fajula, which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, aims to maximize the social and economic impact of the MWC, so that its effects reach the entire city and last all year, but the entity has also set itself the purpose of helping to define the digital future from Barcelona. In this sense, due to its geostrategic position and thanks to GSMA's decision to permanently keep the congress in the city, the Catalan capital presents itself as an ideal place to address global challenges, such as ensuring a sustainable and ethical use of technology.
Organized in collaboration with CASA SEAT, Must Media Group and Barcelona Global, in this new session of The New Barcelona – Moments Estel·lars, journalist and UPF-BSM professor Toni Aira will converse with Francesc Fajula and Pilar Conesa about the role of cities in this accelerated digital transformation, about the legacy of the MWC and about the need to incorporate a social and humanist vision into the technological revolution. To attend as an audience and also be able to ask questions to the speakers, it is necessary to reserve a place in advance. To get a ticket, click here.
Pilar Conesa is the founder and CEO of the Barcelona-based consultancy Anteverti and curator of the Smart City Expo World Congress and its various spin-offs held worldwide. She has over 30 years of experience in management positions in the field of ICT, both public and private, having served as the head of the technology area (CIO) of the Barcelona City Council and as general director of Public Sector and Healthcare at T-Systems Iberia.
She is president of the Business Council of the Barcelona Innova Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board of Digital Future Society, the General Council of MACBA, and the Board of Trustees of EADA Business School. She is a regular speaker at global events and a judge for international urban innovation competitions –Reinventer Paris, World Smart City Awards, Le Monde Cities–. She is the first woman to have been awarded the honorary prize of La Nit de les Telecomunicacions de Catalunya. From Anteverti, she advises cities, governments, and companies to innovate to be more efficient and sustainable, with a multidisciplinary team expert in smart cities, economic development, digital transformation, urban innovation, sustainability and Agenda 2030, and internationalization.
For his part, Francesc Fajula is the general director of Mobile World Capital Barcelona since July 2022. Considered one of the pioneers of the digital industry in Spain, Fajula has more than twenty years of experience in the sector, where he has developed his career in large corporations such as Terra, Banesto, Grupo Santander, Banco Sabadell, or Dominion Global.
His professional career began as E-Commerce director at Terra, participating in the creation of the first marketplace which he expanded internationally. Subsequently, he served as director of Innovation and Digital Strategy at Grupo Santander, promoting Smartbank and all the bank's apps. He also created entrepreneurship programs and an accelerator in San Francisco under the auspices of Santander, ICEX and Red.es. Later, he continued his career at Banco Sabadell as director of Digital Transformation and Innovation. During his last stage, he served as general director of Financial Services at Dominion Global. Fajula has extensive experience in promoting the technological field, both in large-scale innovation projects and in accelerating startups and promoting young talent.