When you open the mobile app to order a taxi, when you pay by card, or when you watch a series on Netflix, these applications do not work in isolation. Behind them is an invisible network of digital infrastructures: APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). They are the digital backroom that makes the mobile ecosystem work, and without them, 80% of current applications would stop working.

It has surely been the worst week for Mark Zuckerberg since the founding of Facebook. The tycoon has had to announce the dismantling of his virtual reality metaverse, after having burned 80 billion dollars in a bet that the public has received with indifference. While Meta makes a desperate turn towards AI to save face, the judicial front has opened a leak that threatens the entire business model of social networks. Two US juries have issued rulings holding Meta and YouTube directly responsible for designing deliberately addictive products.

Mark Zuckerberg has put an end to the virtual reality version of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was supposed to be the gateway to his metaverse. He announced it last Tuesday on Meta's official forums and in emails to users. It's no surprise: it's the formal liquidation of a project that had been agonizing for years and never surpassed 300,000 monthly active users; a ridiculous figure for a company that hosts 3 billion humans on its platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg has put an end to the virtual reality version of Horizon Worlds, the platform that was supposed to be the gateway to his metaverse. He announced it last Tuesday on Meta's official forums and in emails to users. It's no surprise: it's the formal liquidation of a project that had been agonizing for years and never surpassed 300,000 monthly active users; a ridiculous figure for a company that hosts 3 billion humans on its platforms.

When firefighters combat a forest fire in Les Gavarres or the Mossos carry out an operation in a motorway tunnel, they don't use their mobile phones, but radios connected to RESCAT, the Emergency and Security Radio Network of Catalonia: owned by the Generalitat, operated and maintained by Cellnex Telecom, and designed not to fail even when the power goes out.

The AI/telecoms duo

In one of the aisles of Hall 2, there's an advertisement that reads "No mobile, no AI," and it's true. Two key themes of this year's event are AI for networks and networks for AI. The first focuses on optimizing and making telecommunications more profitable, whether by switching segments on and off based on demand or entrusting customer service to algorithms. At the Google Cloud booth, I saw a demonstration of Amdocs' dashboard, which shows each mobile subscriber a human supervisor sees when we call the company complaining about our rates. The tools they have at their disposal to decide whether or not to give us a discount are impressive. In the second area, the increased use of generative AI is forcing a change in network architecture: until now, 90% of the bits circulating through the network have been downlink, towards our devices; telecom companies are already working on a scenario where the ratio is 60% (downlink) to 40% (uplink). Just one clue: Huawei predicts that by 2035 there will be 900 billion AI agents doing things on the network, one hundred for each of the 9 billion humans.

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Water connected

On the first day of MWC, at the southern entrance of Fira Gran Via, all attendees could pick up a bottle sponsored by Agbar, which they could refill at the 30 tap water fountains scattered throughout the venue. The aim is to facilitate hydration, promote local consumption, and reduce waste—although some booths insist on offering bottled water. The water company also distributed a few more sophisticated reusable bottles with an NFC chip inside the cap. When you hold your phone near the chip, it displays a map of the nearest water fountains. It would be even better if it counted how many times you refilled it, saving you the tedious task of recording it in your usual health app. Regardless of the bottle model, what many visitors don't know is that these fountains are interconnected and record water consumption, a less visible example of the so-called Internet of Things. In fact, Vodafone took advantage of MWC to boast about the 16 million devices it has active in Spain. Apart from many V16 beacons, more than 1.8 million of these connected objects are precisely water meters.

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The booth of rare screens

Beyond the plague of humanoid robots and Xiaomi electric cars, if there's one photogenic stand at MWC, it's Lenovo and Motorola's. Nowhere else will you find so many computers in unusual formats, especially laptops: ones that automatically extend upwards to display a full page, or to both sides to provide more space for video games. These extendable screens, by the way, are manufactured by Samsung Display. Lenovo is also exhibiting at MWC a laptop with two internal screens, one with a 3D effect, and a doubly modular model: it has a detachable external screen that functions as a tablet, combined with a removable keyboard, and interchangeable connection ports for when a USB-C isn't needed, but an HDMI port is. Motorola, Lenovo's mobile brand, has announced in Barcelona a smartphone...googled which uses the alternative operating system GrapheneOS. There's a slight touch of revenge involved, because Motorola Mobility was owned by Google between 2012 and 2014, which ruthlessly divested itself of the company to replace it with its own Nexus brand (now Pixel).

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Satellites are all the rage.

A long-standing tradition at MWC was the Monday debate between the CEOs of the four major European telecommunications operators, whose added value was gender parity. This year, that tradition was broken: in the afternoon, Marc Murtra of Telefónica and Tim Höttges of Deutsche Telekom repeated their usual refrain, demanding better treatment from European regulators that would encourage consolidation into larger groups. According to Murtra, this is essential for the continent's sovereignty, because it's naive to believe that the US and China will provide us with their most advanced AI models in ten years' time. Höttges introduced a new element: he called on states to invest in digital services from the major European telecommunications companies. telecoms European companies, instead of opting for the easy route of contracting with American hyperscalers. Christel Heydemann (Orange) and Margherita Della Valle (Vodafone) met this morning, and Della Valle announced an alliance with Orange and Telefónica to jointly deploy satellite coverage capable of competing with Elon Musk's Starlink, which he announced this afternoon will begin operating. GSMA Intelligence says that 80% of mobile operators already have agreements with some satellite network to supplement service in areas without coverage.

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Honor is in agreement with Apple.

The Chinese gadget brand entertained us with the inevitable humanoid robot performing acrobatics on stage alongside human dancers. Much more interesting was the presentation of thesmartphone The foldable Magic V9 is a true showcase of technology, which the brand contextualized by comparing it to rivals of all kinds, but especially to Apple devices, claiming that, when unfolded, it has more battery life than an iPad and that its energy density surpasses that of an electric car. Despite the competition, Honor boasts that the Magic V9 can exchange files with iPhones as easily as AirDrop, and that the MagicPad 4 tablet can become a second screen for a MacBook. In terms of imaging, Honor wants to go beyond the alliances of other Chinese brands with German optics manufacturers like Hasselblad, Leica, and Zeiss, and has announced an agreement with the American film camera company Arri.

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The Mobile World Congress (MWC) has never been a phone fair. It is a telecommunications event: the congress attendees who fill the halls of Fira de Gran Via come to talk about networks, radio spectrum, mergers, and infrastructure, not phones. These are just the photogenic part of a congress where the global connectivity industry tries to agree on who pays, who wins, and who rules. This year, on the 20th anniversary of the MWC in Barcelona, the big themes are repeated: satellite connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI) applied to networks, the deployment of 5G Advanced, and consolidation among European operators: Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and Vodafone will jointly present the first pan-European federated edge computing infrastructure of the internet cloud. I will talk about them in my daily MWC chronicles in ARA. Despite this, phones will once again capture media attention. And this year, for the first time in a while, there are reasons to pay attention.

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Last Tuesday, the Council of Ministers decided enough was enough: after months of watching how the artificial intelligence tools of big tech companies became automatic generators of child pornography, the Spanish government has ordered the State Attorney General's Office to investigate X, Meta, and TikTok for possible crimes of sexual abuse of minors. Let no one say they weren't warned: when users of Grok, Elon Musk's AI, created 3 million sexualized images in 11 days – 23,000 of which showed minors – perhaps someone in Silicon Valley could have suspected that things weren't going well.

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If anyone still doubted that artificial intelligence is the new battleground of technocapitalism, Super Bowl LX confirmed it. A quarter of the sixty-six commercials aired during last Sunday's game featured AI. At eight million dollars per 30 seconds, digital companies turned the most-watched TV broadcast in the US into a parallel competition to sell us a future that's much brighter on screen than in reality.

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Despite taking place in the digital age, the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) conference has an unmistakably analog character. Not only because you have to enter with a printed badge—now that you can show a QR code on your phone screen almost everywhere—but, above all, because what's on display must be experienced physically: the screens must be seen and the speakers must be heard.

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A free artificial intelligence (AI) butler has recently taken the open-source repository GitHub by storm, boosted Mac Mini sales worldwide, and prompted Anthropic—the company behind the Claude chatbot—to demand a name change. The ClawdBot phenomenon, now renamed OpenClaw, represents the definitive leap from chatbots that "say things" to AI agents that "do things" on your computer. The problem is that security researchers have found hundreds of exposed installations online, with visible credentials and full access to users' computers.

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In the renovation of Barça's iconic stadium, the civil engineering work has taken center stage, not always without controversy. But above the beams and concrete of the new Camp Nou, the club is also deploying a sophisticated technological infrastructure, both to improve the spectator experience on match days and to support the business model of the future Espai Barça. I asked the club's technical managers, from a medium-sized company with 1,500 employees spread across several locations, to explain the new audiovisual, telecommunications, sports performance analysis, and operational systems at the stadium.

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Companies and organizations that suffer data breaches have developed a comforting narrative: "We detected it, patched the security hole, and it won't happen again." The problem is that this mantra ignores an uncomfortable reality: once data has been extracted, it is almost impossible to stop its spread on the dark web, where it can circulate for years. We review three incidents—two very recent ones, Endesa and Spotify, and one older one, the Consorcio Sanitario Integral (the entity that includes the Broggi Hospital in Sant Joan Despí)—as distinct examples of this ongoing crisis and the corporate efforts to reduce the reputational impact.

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Every January, while we're excitedly unwrapping our Christmas presents, Las Vegas hosts CES (Consumer Electronics Show), one of the world's three major consumer electronics trade shows. Since we already take for granted giant TVs, laptops with rollable screens—Lenovo's Legion Pro Rollable unfolds to 23.8 inches—hyper-connected cars, and the AI invasion, we'll focus this report on a roundup of the most original gadgets from the 2026 edition of CES, which closed its doors on Friday.

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The year that has just begun is also shaping up to be a period of accelerated technological transformation. Or so say, once again, the communications departments of companies in the sector. After verifying that the forecasts from a year ago They have been fulfilled, it's time to update them for 2026.

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Each year we dedicate the last Digits and junk To briefly remember, on the occasion of their death, personalities who often don't reach celebrity status but have left a remarkable legacy in the technological field. This is the selection for 2025, which is now ending.

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