trade fair

The 17^th Mediterranean Trade Fair, specialised in folk and world music, will take place from Thursday to Sunday, expected to attract 100,000 people to the city of Manresa, in central Catalonia. The most international fair of its history, it will feature over 300 art activities, host 107 companies and show 35 exhibitions. Highlights of the programme include the popular Portuguese singer Dulce Pontes and the musical duo Toumani Diabaté -the world famous African harpist-and his son Sidiki. Pluralism and the question of "what is popular culture today" will be the defining themes of this year’s event, which will host over 1,000 professionals, including 30 speakers and 180 cultural projects. The Fair will also be a tribute to the late musician Peret, the ‘father’ of Catalan rumba who sadly passed away in August.

This week, the Port of Barcelona has become the world cruise capital, hosting the Seatrade Med 3000, an international conference bringing together 3,000 professionals from the all around the world. It is the leading conference in the field of Mediterranean cruise and is taking place between the 16^th and 18^th of September. This adds to Barcelona’s existing reputation as the European and Mediterranean cruise capital, confirmed with the arrival last Saturday of the world’s largest cruise liner, the Oasis of the Seas, whose first stop after leaving the Caribbean was the Catalan city. Home both to the Oasis of the Seas and the international Seatrade Med 3000 means Barcelona is making nautical headlines worldwide.  

This Saturday the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), the most world's most important heart specialist conference, will begin in Barcelona. Up until the 3^rd of September the Catalan capital will host 30,000 cardiology specialist participants in a summit where 4,500 new studies will be presented about the latest discoveries in vascular diseases, which cause 47% of deaths in Europe. The Catalan Minister for Health, Boi Ruiz, said that efforts should be concentrated on reducing the "inequality" between different areas of the world which register mortality rates that are "unreasonably different".

From the 20^th until the 25^th of July, more than 4,000 scientists, researchers, engineers and academics from 52 countries will meet in Barcelona's Palau de Congressos de Catalunya for the 11^th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM). Experts will be presenting 3,200 scientific papers and 220 mini-symposiums. They will also develop computer simulations that allow studying the operation of aircrafts, nuclear plants and the human body without the need of direct experiments on prototypes and people. More than 300 Catalan researchers will also participate in the summit which, for the first time, is jointly organised with the 5^th European Conference on Computational Mechanics (ECCM) and the 6^th European Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics (ECFD VI).

Barcelona has gone from 22^nd to 7^th place in the list of 468 European cities with the best economic prospects; it is ranked the 19^th most competitive city in the world and the 10^th in Europe; it stands at 10^th in the world in terms of receiving new business investments; and it became the 4^th city hosting the largest amount of congresses at world level. The report was produced by the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona in collaboration with the City Council. Furthermore, another study compiled by ESADE business school stressed that Barcelona is the 1^st European city in money spent per tourist in shopping, ahead of London and Paris. The Mayor of Barcelona, ??Xavier Trias, welcomed the news but also emphasised the ''shadow'' of having more than 100,000 unemployed in Barcelona, a number he finds “unbearable.”

Sónar+D is an international conference for creativity and technological innovation which coincides with the Sónar by Day Festival. The conference will organize lectures, project exhibitions, stage activities and hold meetings with experts to enhance talent and further opportunities in the digital environment creating a strong parallel to the music festival. This year is the second edition of Sónar+D and the conference is growing now bringing together more than 100 companies, as well as artists, entrepreneurs and technicians from around the world to promote talent and business opportunities in the area of ??culture. The festival's co-director Enric Palau recently revealed details about this year’s program, which is a new initiative divided into four areas. An area dedicated to round table conferences, an exhibition area where more than 40 featured worldwide technology projects are to be on show, a space for art shows and an area where attendees can meet renowned professionals.

Throughout this week the Fira de Barcelona's Montjuic exhibition venue in the Catalan capital is transformed into a business fair for start-ups and entrepreneurs. The BizBarcelona event takes place on Wednesday the 4^th and Thursday the 5^th of June and is the second edition of this innovative business fair. The event serves several purposes and contains as many as six different areas including e-commerce, the financial markets, exports, franchises, business consulting as well as cooperation and networking. The event offers various opportunities for established and future entrepreneurs. BizBarcelona is a welcome initiative. First quarter financial reports revealed a decrease in bankruptcy proceedings, and with a high unemployment rate in Catalonia and Spain it is hoped that these new companies can create jobs.

The Igualada-Odena airfield, located in Central Catalonia is home since 1992 to an aeronautical fair called Aerosport. This fair is unique in Spain. While some towns organise more events related to airplanes, this is the only one dedicated to the leisure airplane market. This year Aerosport received more than 6,000 visitors, 200 aircrafts and 35 exhibitors over last weekend. Its objectives are to put customers and companies in contact, to help people discover leisure air activities and to put the Igualada-Odena airfield on the map. Besides the exhibitors stands, aerobatics shows and conferences were also held.

More than 300 innovations from the agri-food industry are presented between the 31^st of March and the 3^rd of April in Alimentaria, one of the main trade fairs for this sector in Europe. The 20^th edition of this event, which takes place in the Catalan capital every two years, focuses on innovation and internationalisation. In fact, 40,000 visitors, 30% of the total 140,000 visitors, are foreigners. In addition, as explained by the Director General of Alimentaria, Antoni Valls, this year the organisers have managed to assemble 600 of the world's main international buyers, which is double the number at the previous fair in 2012. These top buyers have already arrived for 8,000 pre-scheduled business meetings with the 3,800 exhibiting companies at the fair, which occupies 94,500 square metres of Fira de Barcelona's Gran Via venue.

GSMA, the organisers of the Mobile World Congress, have announced on Thursday that more than 85,000 visitors from over 200 countries participated in this year’s event. The figure sets a new impressive attendance record with an overall increase of 18% on last year’s edition. Around 80,000 attendees participated at the Mobile World Congress at Fira de Barcelona’s Gran Via venues and more than 5,000 visitors attended mPowered industries programme at Fira’s Montjuïc venues. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty delivered highly anticipated keynote speeches, while close to 1,800 international market leading companies presented their latest innovative products and services. In the Global Mobile Awards, the HTC One scooped top award of the Best Smartphone of the year, while Apple iPad was announced the Best Mobile Tablet. Wearable devices were also an exciting highlight of the 2014 MWC.

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) has been held in Barcelona from the 24^th to the 27^th of February. All the halls have been filled with excitement as international competitive exhibitors showed their latest products and growing trends in the mobile phone industry. This year, ‘wearable devices’ received world-wide attention. Samsung showcased the newest smartwatches called ‘Gear 2’ and ‘Gear 2 Neo’, and also its cutting-edge smartband called ‘Gear Fit’. Sony also released its latest smartband, called ‘Core’. Other companies such as Motorola, which announced at the MWC it was going to launch a new smartwatch, are about to join this emergent part of the industry.

The App Planet at the Mobile World Congress is one of the biggest app events in the world, and the Catalan App companies have taken full advantage of the opportunity to showcase their latest products. Not only this, several Catalan App companies have come together to form the group ‘Catalunya Apps’, in which big and small companies alike have joined in order to survive and compete on the global stage. ‘InQBarna’ had extraordinary success since last year with their Music based app; they have had 700,000 downloads and Apple named the best music app in 2013. Inqbarna isn’t the only large company to commit to ‘Catalunya Apps’; Sixtemia, founded 5 years ago, is on board as well.

A total of 53 companies are present at the ‘Catalonia’ stand that the Catalan Government has set up at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), for “established companies with international sales to newly-created start-ups”. Larger Catalan companies already dispose of their own stand at the MWC, the world’s largest fair in the mobile phone industry, which was launched on Monday in Barcelona for the 9^th consecutive year. Joan Tarradellas, CEO of the public business innovation agency ACCIÓ, highlighted the heterogeneity of the companies present at the ‘Catalonia’ stand, which work on different fields, from developing applications for the biomedical sector to dealing with social networks, urban mobility or ‘smart cities’.

Within a year, Pope Francis’ Twitter account, @Pontifex, has reached 12 million followers while his tweets are 4 times more re-tweeted than the ones of U.S. President Barack Obama. Indeed, each of Pope Francis’ messages generates an average of 6,637 re-tweets, while Obama’s messages are re-tweeted 2,309 times on average. Such data was unveiled on Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is the main international event of cell phone related technologies. After analyzing the Pope’s impact on the digital environment, the study ‘The Internet loves Pope Francis’ concludes that Pope Francis is the world leader with the greatest influence in social networks, above the Dalai Lama or Cristina Kirchner.

Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s biggest congress in the mobile phone industry, takes place from today until Thursday in Barcelona. The Catalan capital is hosting this event for the 9th consecutive year. More than 1,800 companies from all over the world showcase their latest products at the event and more than 77,000 visitors are anticipated at the conference centre at Fira Gran Via. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and new owner of Whatsapp, will follow today’s earlier speech by Whatsapp founder Jan Koum with his highly anticipated keynote talk. Virginia Rometty, IBM´s CEO and recently pronounced most powerful woman in Business, will also appear as a keynote speaker on Wednesday. Leading mobile phone companies such as Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Huawei, HTC and others are expected to launch their new devices at the exhibition.