0
Interview
GIRONA - 3 December 2017 2.00 h

ALEIX VALLS

FORMER GENERAL DIRECTOR OF THE MOBILE WORLD CAPITAL OF BARCELONA AND DIGITAL CONSULTANT

“Soon technology will be as essential as English”

- GIRONA

Aleix Valls was the gen­eral di­rec­tor of the Mo­bile World Cap­i­tal of Barcelona for the last year and a half. He did a job that seems ex­tremely com­plex be­cause it means keep­ing up with the peo­ple who have held it for a long time. Valls left the po­si­tion from mu­tual agree­ment. Since July he has em­barked on new chal­lenges in the pri­vate sec­tor as a dig­i­tal con­sul­tant. We talked to him about how he sees the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of Cata­lan com­pa­nies and the world.

Some peo­ple say that the Mo­bile and the 4YFN have given us a big hit once a year. Is that about right?
The con­gress is an event in which we all look to­wards tech­nol­ogy and we re­flect on where we are going as a so­ci­ety. Above all, wher­ever dig­i­tal eco­nomic trans­for­ma­tion is hap­pen­ing, both eco­nom­i­cally and so­cially.
Why did you leave the po­si­tion of di­rec­tor of the Mo­bile?
For seven years I de­voted my­self to this role very in­tensely. We were able to do won­der­ful things: the 4YFN and other ini­tia­tives, and I was happy to close this chap­ter and start new pro­fes­sional ad­ven­tures. It was a mu­tual agree­ment to do so. Being a di­rec­tor of the MWC was lovely. Stress­ful like any am­bi­tious but a re­ward­ing pro­ject.
What is left to still be done?
The area of dig­i­tal tal­ent and the new gen­er­a­tions to come are even more fas­ci­nated with tech. MSchools was a pro­ject in the fourth year of ESO, a very good ini­tia­tive to begin to in­tro­duce a pas­sion for tech­nol­ogy, to un­der­stand that in the fu­ture, whether you are a doc­tor or lawyer, tech­nol­ogy will be as fun­da­men­tally im­por­tant as Eng­lish is today.
What do you think we will be sur­pris­ing in the fu­ture of mo­bile tech­nol­ogy?
The cur­rent pop­u­la­tion of the world is seven bil­lion peo­ple and there are more than ten bil­lion mo­bile con­nec­tions world­wide. This means that we are wit­ness­ing tech­nol­ogy that is the first uni­ver­sal and de­mo­c­ra­tic prod­uct. Every­one will have a cell phone. We are look­ing at a tool that will change the ways of doing busi­ness, of re­lat­ing to each other and the shap­ing of the econ­omy. In the fu­ture we won’t see any dra­matic change in the de­vice; we will begin to see more and more in­te­gra­tion of tech­nolo­gies, such as aug­mented or vir­tual re­al­ity in cam­eras on the same mo­bile, of­fer­ing more ad­vanced ser­vices but above all, the con­nec­tiv­ity of things. The car is one of the de­vices that al­ready does some of this but there are oth­ers things such as home au­toma­tion. From the fridge or TV, every­day prod­ucts will be fur­ther con­nected, trans­form­ing into more in­tel­li­gent ob­jects.
They con­sider you to be one of Cat­alo­nia’s tech­no­log­i­cal gurus. Where does your pas­sion come from?
When I did my doc­toral the­sis, I was pro­gram­ming a lot be­cause I used com­put­ers to sim­u­late equa­tions and I began to dis­cover the world of tech­nol­ogy and its uses in areas where they were not com­mon. Busi­ness is now into dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. We have al­ready seen it in media, ad­ver­tis­ing or music pro­duc­tion. In this way busi­ness is be­com­ing more and more dig­i­tal and we have to­tally changed the ways of con­sump­tion. As well though, there are places where it is not hap­pen­ing so much, such as the bank­ing sec­tor for ex­am­ple or real es­tate and also in sec­tors where it seems that how they work with is not dig­i­ti­z­able.
In the real es­tate field, what dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion will we see?
I see var­i­ous changes com­ing. Build­ings will be in­creas­ingly in­tel­li­gent and sus­tain­able. Al­most 95% of apart­ment sales are through web por­tals. So far, they are only dig­i­tal list­ings, with­out sales ca­pac­ity, but I’m start­ing to see emerg­ing com­pa­nies that are giv­ing them the abil­ity to ac­tu­ally make trans­ac­tions. When this hap­pens, or­di­nary sales peo­ple dis­ap­pear, be­cause you are able to give much more ser­vice along with much lower mar­gins and this ends up chang­ing the way we buy and sell apart­ments today.
But this will mean that real es­tate agents will be out of work.
At the mo­ment build­ing gen­er­ates data and there will be the pos­si­bil­ity to be able to un­der­stand, an­a­lyze and ex­ploit this and the chance, to offer ser­vices with more added value.
Will tech­nol­ogy im­prove our econ­omy?
Yes, it will gen­er­ate more com­pet­i­tive­ness. An­other ques­tion is if we will be good when it comes dis­trib­ut­ing it. This will re­sult in fresh chal­lenges and new pro­fes­sion­als with new kno·ledge, peo­ple who are able to take ad­van­tage of more data and run new busi­ness mod­els.
Sign in. Sign in if you are already a verified reader. I want to become verified reader. To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader.
Note: To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader and accept the conditions of use.

Published on

Most Viewed