Harbour.Space at the Mobile World Conference

When it comes to mobile, there’s no greater meeting of the minds than the GSMA Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest and most influential mobile conference. Held in Barcelona, this year’s event managed to surpass all expectations, with over 2,000 companies exhibiting and record numbers of attendees who travelled from all over to take part. This year’s list of keynote speakers read like a who’s who of the mobile tech industry and included some of the most successful names in the business such as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti, China Mobile CEO Shang Bing and Mark Zuckerberg, who obviously needs no introduction.

Harbour.Space, Europe’s state-of-the-art university for technology, design and tech entrepreneurship was proud to be involved in this year’s program. Our workshop, ‘Disrupted By Mobile’ brought together a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a corporate executive, a successful entrepreneur and a talent matchmaker all in the one room. Although from different sides of the industry, the speakers had one key thought in common: what are the ingredients for a successful startup in tech?

For presenter and Harbour.Space CEO Svetlana Velikanova, one of those key ingredients is talent. The industry is currently experiencing a shortage of well-educated professionals. Through immersive and progressive learning, Harbour.Space aims to create an environment where gifted young people can evolve and emerge as ground-breaking graduates. By connecting the best in the business today with the talented minds of tomorrow, Harbour.Space can help revolutionise our tech future.

It’s a future in which mobile will play a vital role, believes Faculty Leader of Digital Marketing, Vimpelcom CEO and internet entrepreneur Anna Znamenskaya. As someone who’s created her own $150 million startup, Znamenskaya is well aware of the important role our phones play. These days we use them for so much more than a phone call. There’s huge demand for new services like messengers, payments, transfers, video and games. So while today’s mobile operators face great challenges to meet ongoing consumer demands, these challenges are also creating big opportunities for tech startups.

Just be careful not to flood your audience with too much information, said Toptal’s Global Head of Community Kenan Salihbegovic. Rather than using brute force to acquire users, today’s companies should try to interact with customers in deeper, more meaningful ways.

Also sharing her knowledge of what it takes to establish a successful startup was Tina Mashaalahi. Noticing a gap in the online ticketing space, Mashaalahi created KweekWeek, now recognised as one of the UK’s top 100 startup companies.

And what does it take for tech startups to get noticed and achieve the financial backing they need to take off? Offering his insights from a venture capitalist’s perspective was Altpoint’s Ventures Managing Director, Vadim Tarasov.