After the success of a first edition launched to awaken digital vocations, Talent Arena returns to the fray in a second edition where it levels up: it will debut the XPRO Zone, with advanced content aimed at developers and ICT professionals, and will feature presentations by luminaries such as the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, as one of the main attractions.
With more than 200 conferences in total, Talent Arena will also include workshops and hackathons, such as one proposed by the Barça Innovation Hub for the analysis of football matches. Again at Fira de Barcelona's Montjuïc venue, the event will be held from March 2 to 4 within the framework of the Mobile World Congress and 4YFN, which will fill the Gran Via venue, a few stops away from Plaça Espanya.
With the aim of promoting the city's digital talent and connecting it with industry and training, Talent Arena grows in spaces, activities, and conferences. In addition to Berners-Lee, the event's lineup also includes Boston Dynamics AI Institute researcher Kate Darling, Linux Foundation Vice President of Education, Tim Serewicz, and music producer and entrepreneur Steve Aoki, who will address "how technology mixes with creativity," explained Mobile World Capital Barcelona CEO, Francesc Fajula, alongside GSMA CEO, John Hoffman, at the event's presentation.
"Everything ends up depending on human talent, and there is human talent here," Hoffman emphasized, all with one goal: "To build an ecosystem that is not local; it is based in Barcelona, but it is not local, it is global." In this vein, as Fajula highlighted, the event's objective is to build "a community of communities," and to act as a key tool to accompany, promote, and connect talent: "In a single edition, it has become a benchmark event in the digital talent ecosystem."
In this second edition, Talent Arena aims to consolidate this positioning as a benchmark, and go further. After a first edition that gathered some 20,000 people —with queues and moments when the venue was at maximum capacity—, the event will also offer 45 workshops and hackathons promoted by leading operators and entities. All of this will be structured around six thematic axes that will mark the future of the industry: the essential AI, software engineering, cloud computing, cybersecurity, management, and emerging technologies, such as quantum computing and NewSpace.
In order to boost the digital ecosystem, the event is strengthened towards the more junior side and also towards the more professional side. At one end, with the free, open and participatory access zone and, at the other, the new XPRO Zone, focused on advanced knowledge for developers and active professionals. This space will combine networking and coworking areas with more than 70 conferences and 15 workshops and hackathons, within an event promoted by Mobile World Capital Barcelona and co-organized with GSMA, and with the collaboration of the City Council, the Generalitat and the Ministry of Digital Transformation.
Also new, the exhibition will include a new robotics zone, where visitors can experiment with the most innovative technologies, and a gaming zone, focused on the latest trends in video games, with simulation of interactive and playful experiences. These new zones are added to proposals that were tested in the first edition and are repeated in this second, such as the Skills Hub, aimed at developing key competencies for the labor market, and the Mentoring Zone, where junior profiles can receive advice from experienced professionals.
Barcelona with its own name
"The Talent Arena is a success, just as developing 4YFN within the Mobile structure was in its day," added the Deputy Mayor for Economy of Barcelona, Jordi Valls. And it is that "the generation of digital talent has strategic importance," both for the economy and also because "a way to gain sovereignty is to have well-trained people," he said in the presentation.In addition, this digital talent represents "an opportunity to diversify the economy and to go beyond the metropolitan environment," as added the Secretary of Digital Policies of the Generalitat, Maria Galindo Garcia-Delgado. Along the same lines, the delegate of the central government in Catalonia, Carlos Prieto, has advocated for continuing to strengthen the ecosystem and continuing to promote the city in this area: "May Barcelona not have to compare itself with Silicon Valley, but rather be a Barcelona with its own name that does not have to compare itself with any other place."