Every year in Feb, Barcelona becomes one of the top destinations in the world for Mobile industry. MWC (Mobile World Congress) is one of the largest exhibitions for Mobile industry and a conference with many prominent executives and celeb entrepreneurs representing carriers, device manufacturers, tech solution vendors and contents providers from all over the world. Basically, if you are in the Mobile industry, you have to be there to meet potential customers/partners and promote your solution/companies to bigger players.

It has been exactly 4 years since I visited Barcelona to attend MWC 2012 to manage a demo booth sponsored by Google. Back then, Com2us published a snowboarding mobile game, SummitX Snowboarding developed by 3rd party developer called Free Range Games and been selected by Google to demo the game on one their booths. It was Google’s first participation at MWC and showed a lot of the Google’s product as well as Google technology through its partners’s solution. Mobile game was one of the highlights of their demos since it could showcase what the latest Android version is capable of by entertaining all the visitors.

4 years later, I was back to Barcelona with a different position as the director of Center for Creative Economy & Innovation (CCEI) to visit KT(Korea Telecom)’s booth and to help Korean startups who had a mini booths there. It was similar setting but now the sponsor was KT instead of Google who covered all the demo booth expenses for the Korean startups, plus their travel cost to Barcelona! Only a several startups among the CCEI’s startup batch have been selected to go to MWC but it was a great opportunity for them to visit Barcelona and find business opportunities.

One of the startups was a IoT(Internet of Things) Smart Lever Lock startup called Amadas and not only they demoed the product but also they were invited to attend the startup pitching event at 4YFN. 4YFN (4 Years From Now) is an MWC-affiliate startup conference that was held in the same period during MWC in a different venue and it was funny that I attended ‘4 Years From Now’ after 4 years later since I visited Barcelona. It must have been my fate to come back to Barcelona 4 years from then. 🙂

Although there are many attendees from the world at such a global event, a new startup could be lost in the crowd easily. Most people are interested in the major announcement or product release such as Samsung Galaxy S7 Unpacked event, so it’s very challenging for a new startup to be recognized not to mention its publicity. Surviving in a major exhibition or conference such as MWC and 4YFN is very important because your once-in-a-life time chance could be found at the venue when you don’t pay enough attention. I was among the crowd who were blind-folded by Gear VR at the Samsung Unpacked event, not realizing the Facebook CEO was passing by. Not that I wanted to meet him eagerly but it symbolize how anyone can miss business opportunity right in front of you.

One of the surviving tips is to find your champion who can open doors for you to many business networks. In our case, it was Wayra, a startup accelerator backed up by Telefonica Open Future. Gyeonggi CCEI has established a working relationship with Wayra to exchange startups to sponsor their travel and accommodation during their stay. Wayra’s director was well-connected to key persons at European carriers as well as many Spanish startups who were in Wayra’s acceleration program. Thanks to him, I could introduce Amadas to Orange’s director as well as Deutche Telecom’s director, otherwise I would never had a chance to know who the key persons are during the business event at 4YFN.

Another way to survive at the big conference is to interact with key speakers publicly by asking questions, if you are brave and think you can ask relevant questions to the topic or tweeting publicly during their talk or presentation. Either their marketing manager or PR manager would be Retweeting or Replying to your relevant messages and it’s a good start to connect with influential people or companies. Chartboost’s CEO, a female Spanish(or should I say Catalan) co-founder who is from Barcelona was one of the panelists at the Mobile Game Marketing session at 4YFN and it was a great chance to ask her a question and tweet about it. Immediately my tweet was retweeted to thousands of its followers.

One of the challenges at a crowded exhibition is finding the whereabouts of your team who are attending the event. Business meetings are held at a meeting rooms or specific location at the scheduled time but locating your team could be difficult. In my case, I used Zenly, a real-time locator app to share my location with my team. It was very convenient how I can check my team’s location in real-time basis. As matter of fact, I was able to locate the co-founder of Zenly at MWC exhibition floor and meet him easily after I found out that he was nearby.

Lastly, you must find a way to be invited to the key networking parties. Since there are many open parties, it’s not difficult to attend a couple of them but invitation-only parties where most of the influential people show up could be difficult. There is the front door where the invited guest can enter and the back door where the people with good connection to the host could enter, but for the unrecognized startups, both doors may not be accessible. However, startups need to be creative and bold to find a way in and that’s why the episodes of the survived startups are always fun and entertaining.