Web Summit 2014 in Dublin: Report

Web Summit in Dublin is one of the largest technology conferences in the world, which gathers under its wing the most famous IT gurus of the planet and hundreds of startups that are not very interesting. Last year in Dublin there was, for example, Elon Musk, in this — the founders of Evernote, Oculus Rift and Dropbox, as well as Bono and Eva Langoria (there was to be a vulgar joke). As in any large forum, people come here for investments, search for partners and acquaintances. For large global companies, this event is rather image. Well, the Robots went to the summit for inspiration and prepared a small report on what they saw.

Evernote and Oculus VR

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Evernote CEO Phil Libin and Oculus VR CEO Brendan Ayribe performed in a public interview format: they were asked questions by Wired journalists Jesse Hempel and Peter Rubin .

Phil eloquently explained that Evernote is a lovemark . Specific questions about the product monetization model, however, did not bring as specific answers. Phil only said that in the 7 years of its existence, Evernote received about $ 300 million investment and the only source of income is a paid subscription, which costs $ 5 per month and has never changed. In this case, the longer the user uses Evernote, the more he is inclined to switch to a paid subscription. The number of Premium users of Evernote, according to his estimates, is about 8-9 million people, while Phil clarified that not everyone acquired this status for money. The Evernote revenue model does not contain any “hidden” mechanisms, he stressed. To a large extent, the speech of the head of Evernote consisted of quite lengthy arguments. “The secret of success is a good product. Do what you really like, and then a billion users will not take long, ”he said confidently. The head of Evernote summed up his speech with the words that he would like to be a superproductive Superman - he likes it more than the role of a classic CEO with a staff of subordinates and a loyal assistant.

Oculus VR's Brendan Iribe spoke a lot about how the company’s business changed after it became part of Facebook. Now the focus of Oculus VR is on recruiting - the number of assorted people has increased from 50 to 200 - and studies that are designed to analyze all the scenarios for using the product. Speech about the rush does not go: in his time, Mark Zuckerberg himself stressed that Oculus VR for Facebook is a long-term investment. Brendan, in turn, was full of optimism and expressed confidence that virtual reality will take place in our life no less important than the telephone and the Internet.

In general, the speeches of CEOs and founders Evernote and Oculus Rift caused mixed feelings and, to tell the truth, were not impressed. There was too much talk about lovemarks, best products and unique vision, but practically nothing about business. The most valuable ideas and scenarios most often came across in the surrounding main performances of a start-up soup of several hundred mini-teams.

Trends

For three days at the summit, we identified several areas that were more visible than others:

Wearable device

All IT entrepreneurs - from giants like Google with their Anroid Wear and Apple with Watch of the same name to small teams - are trying to find winning scenarios for using wearable electronics. A separate discussion was devoted to the future of this trend with the participation of Liam Casey, head of custom electronics manufacturer PCH International, and Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media. The latter spoke about a new approach to design: wearables are not only industrial design, but also interface design. At the summit was attended by the head of the direction of new Intel devices Michael Bell, who voiced not a particularly original idea that the market for “smart watches” will be received by a company that can simultaneously please both fashionistas and geeks.

Business solutions

IT entrepreneurs at the summit tried to offer the business a solution to a whole range of tasks: retail and e-commerce; data analysis to improve business performance; solutions for corporate communications; work with social networks and, of course, everything related to HR. The problem of hiring employees and working with staff is eternal, and there are no universal solutions for HR on the market. Now it is more fashionable to say not “recruiting” or “hiring”, but “talent search”. In Dublin, there were several companies and startups offering technical solutions for businesses in the field of hiring. This, for example, is a well-known Talent Square and almost no one familiar to Clinch and Simplicant . There are many international projects like the Russian HeadHunter, which are rapidly growing and developing mainly due to the connection to the primary bases of small local recruitment agencies.

Education

Online courses and e-learning in general is not a new trend, but no less relevant for that. Confirmation of this is a fair amount of projects offering solutions for creating learning platforms (for example, Patience ) and other educational startups of various kinds. Startups are trying to find a potential audience for their projects in social networks, arguing that people are active there. Many, by the way, seem to lose sight of the fact that people who really want to grow and educate themselves do not spend time in social networks, but in several other places. A separate trend is the education of children in a game format, in the spirit of Toca Boca .

The medicine

Not only Google with its nanoparticles and magnetic bracelet , but also smaller players, including startups, are interested in the complex subject of diagnosing diseases. Web Summit participants also talked about making medicine new to technology. That was what was discussed in the Decoding Disease lecture: Technology and the Cure for Cancer, co-founder of the biotech start-up Miroculus, George Soto. In Miroculus, they invented a device called Miriam, which, on the one hand, looks like a spectrograph for food, on the other hand, it resembles checking fines through a mobile application. With the only difference that Miriam does not analyze products or debt, but blood, identifying the presence of specific cancer miRNAs in it. Via Bluetooth, the result is transmitted to the smartphone and compared with the records in the cloud database. The developers promise that the device will cost no more than $ 500 and will lead to a real revolution in the detection of cancer in the early stages. While there is only a prototype. In short, scientists already have algorithms for the early detection of serious diseases, but many issues, in particular with the processing of the information received, have not yet been resolved.

Startup Fair

The Web Summit is the perfect place to look for a team or idea for a business. The significant difference between the teams from Western Europe and, for example, India, Mexico or Australia is striking. The latter are quite clearly focused on business and making money. Almost all of them already have clients and a proven business model, are wary of investments and came to the forum in order to find clients and partners in new markets.

Europeans are affected by a startup virus, which has the following symptoms:

• A startup already has or expects to receive investments in the absence of a proven business model and a distinct product;
• The team aims at several rounds of investment and the explosive growth of indirect indicators of the type of customer base, revenue with an incomprehensible margin, but not profit;
• A project is often an inadequate or very local solution.

Summing up, one can hardly say that the Web Summit was full of revelations. Many speakers wander with the same reports from conference to conference: what they told in Dublin already sounded either on TEDX or elsewhere. On the other hand, there are not so many places where the DropBox, GitHub, Oculus VR and, for example, the Spanish choreographer who dreams of becoming a cyborg perform on neighboring scenes. In general, if you are looking for inspiration, then you are in Dublin.