Web Summit 2015 Conference Review

November 3-5, in Dublin (Ireland), the largest in Europe technology conference Web Summit 2015 was held , which brought together leading entrepreneurs, investors, programmers, managers, inventors, designers and thinkers from around the world. “Davos for geeks,” Bloomberg called the Web Summit 2015. "Defining the motion vector of the market," called the British forum the Guardian. “A grand meeting of IT industry leaders from around the world,” the conference was described in The New York Times. For a better understanding of the value of companies that took part in the conference, we quote a NASDAQ quote from the conference website: "There was a quarter trillion dollars - the cost of private Internet companies in the room."

Web Summit (Dublin Web Summit) is an annual technology conference, which has been held since 2010. Over the years, the forum’s audience has grown from 400 to more than 40,000 participants from more than 140 countries. This year, more than 1,000 speakers spoke at the 21 Web Summit sites. About 1,5 thousand journalists covered the event.

Performances on all stages were going on at the same time, therefore many participants could not attend everything they wanted to attend. Those who missed the lectures of interest to him and those who did not get to the conference at all will be able to see the recording of any speech on the Web Summit on YouTube .


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Among the guests of the event were representatives of the world's largest technology startups included in the Fortune 500, representatives from Microsoft, Stripe, Instagram, Intel Capital, Facebook, Tinder, Slack and many other giants, including Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, Reed Hastings, founder Pure Software and Netflix, Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and SpaceX, Adriana Huffington, founder of the Huffington post, Drew Houston, founder and CEO of Dropbox, Niklas Zennstrom, creator of Skype and other world-famous personalities.



The Web Summit 2015 conference program was designed for 3 days and divided into thematic sections: platforms for startups, investors, graphic designers, artists, content authors, programmers, entrepreneurs, marketers, etc.


In addition, the conference included such unique seminars as: “Sport” - a seminar held within the Web Summit and dedicated to technology in sports, “Fashion”, in which participants discussed the integration of fashion and technology, “Music”, bringing together musicians, producers, managers and businessmen, “Food-festival”, which gathered more than 30 Irish food suppliers and chefs, “City” - a platform where it was discussed how technologies influence the improvement of quality and productivity of cities, “Medicine” - seminar, pic dedicated to technical innovations in medicine, “Machines” is a seminar dedicated to robotics, automation of machine processes and analysis of large data arrays.



Many unique startups were able to present their projects at the Web Summit Alpha exhibition. And if earlier, as a rule, only large companies, agencies and banks took part in it, then this year all the premises of the Web Summit Dublin exhibition complex were given to budding start-ups and small firms that are looking for investors and partners. As the summit organizer Paddy Cosgrave said, at his event you can become a millionaire, without even contacting the bank, the investor will find the startup starter himself.



A lot of interesting ideas and statements were made at the summit sites. One of them was the statement by Shervin Pishevara of Sherpa Capital and the CEO of Hyperloop company Rob Lloyd about closing a $ 26 million investment contract as part of a $ 80 million investment project.

The project of the vacuum train Hyperloop - an old dream of its author, Elon Mask - is able to completely change our usual understanding of the method and speed of movement. About a month ago, Rob Lloyd led a startup, taking the post of CEO, with the goal of "commercializing the idea of ​​Elon Musk about the movement of people and goods at speeds up to 700 miles per hour using steel pipes." Hyperloop will allow passengers to travel at the speed of sound and make it possible to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. According to company forecasts, we will be able to experience Hyperloop as early as 2020.



Along with Hyperloop, Kickstarter also became the center of attention by sharing its ideas. From the crowdfunding platform, one of its co-founders, Yancy Strickler, took part in the conference. The Irish Times published the words of Yancy on the official website.

As stated in The Irish Times, instead of the usual profit orientation, Kickstarter recently changed the conditions for registration, becoming a public corporation in the state of Delaware with a legal obligation to take into account the influence of a firm’s decisions on society, and not just on shareholders. Yancy Strickler and Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen believe that changing focus will benefit the platform, which will still remain a commercial company.

At the Web Summit 2015, Yancy also shared the point of view of his company: “We allowed independent designers and developers to work on what they really like simply because they like it - the category of things that traditional investors do not consider attractive enough. Most brilliant ideas come to life from people who are not interested in making money: they just want their ideas to exist. I feel that we must allow people to create what they want to bring to life. ”



One of the conference sections, the Money Summit, was entirely devoted to electronic payments: cryptocurrency, payments, personal finance, fraud, and financial services. Money Summit was organized in order to bring together established players and innovators in the field of payment technologies, to discuss innovative ideas in the field of payments. The most influential experts in the world, founders and leaders of companies such as PayPal, Stripe, BitPay, Visa, MasterCard and TransferWise are just a part of those who visited the Web Summit Money.

John Delaney from Open Wi-Fi, a privately owned hot spot, shared his vision of what the end product should be: “You need to make your product simple for people. No need to complicate. We were convinced on our own experience: if a difficulty arose, and you didn’t do anything, the whole project may fail. ”

John added: “This year's Web Summit is devoted to analyzing data and the Internet of things, analyzing and controlling things in your own home. We want to control everything. There is nothing surprising; we went to this for years. But we are not interested in analytics, we are not trying to do this, because everything has already been done. We only help people to establish contact with their customers. "

Among the interesting ideas sounded at the summit, there was the idea of ​​Adilet Abylov from Spalmalo: “cars make people happier, because cars cannot lie. They can not hurt. I think that people should interact more closely with machines. ”

From the statistics published on the Web Summit blog: more than 95,000 conversations took place at the conference. The average speech duration was 9 minutes and 14 seconds.

Many participants of the Web Summit 2015 conference will be remembered as the confrontation between the Government of Ireland and the organizers of the summit. Even before the opening of the event, the organizers said that Dublin will receive guests for the last time, next year the conference will move to the capital of Portugal. The reason for this decision, according to Paddy Cosgrave, was the lack of technical equipment of the Irish capital and lack of organization of the infrastructure. The news of the postponement of Europe’s largest technical forum caused concern to the Irish government. The Irish Industrial Development Agency (AIDA) has expressed concern that the Web Summit Lisabon will not succeed, as the southern country will distract potential entrepreneurs.


Summit organizer Paddy Cosgrave

Anyway, the Web Summit is one of those conferences that any country will be happy to host. Paddy Cosgrave clearly demonstrated the ability to attract a huge number of influential players to his project. And although the organizers always have something to strive for and have something to improve, the problems at the conference fade in comparison with the inspiring atmosphere that prevailed at the events thanks to people and companies gathered in Dublin.

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