Jawad A. Anjum
Staff Writer
Creativity: check. Entrepreneurship: check. Invention and innovation, you bet. The Dublin Web Summit (DWS) took place over 2 days last week. Crammed with 100 different speakers and 1,500 attendees, for anyone involved in the IT and software industry, the RDS was the place to be. Thanks to founder Paddy Cosgrave, under one roof, you could get a glimpse of the future of the internet in Ireland and the continually evolving role it play in our lives.
Being a veritable networking goldmine, present at the summit were the founders of Skype, YouTube, Twitter, Bebo and LinkedIn. Alongside these industry giants were top brass from Google, AOL, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and other market leaders. The summit had various stages for different interests such as cloud computing, social media, and start-ups. You could expect up to 3 different speakers at any one time.
Among the plethora of start-ups present were ‘banquity’ – a platform for mobile banking, ‘supply.ie’ – a website providing, essentially, a purchases department for small to medium business, ‘Riffstation – software for guitarists whether amateur of professional and ‘GBR’ who deal with identity security and trust.
The changing face of modern journalism was on display with Mark Little, founder of ‘Storyful’ – a website that gives news through carefully selected and verified tweets, updates and YouTube videos. Also in this category was Carla Buzasi, the editor of the UK edition of ‘Huffington Post’, the largest growing online news site in the world. She was keen to draw in Irish bloggers to contribute content for the website. The primary coverage of this event came from RTE who did an excellent job of reporting the event and showing people the excitement that was palpable over the two days. RTE unveiled their new iPhone and iPad apps, matching increasing demand for internet TV.
Twitter came up in many different contexts. Tony Wang of Twitter UK spoke of their planned international office here in Dublin but remained vague on the details. On the side was the ‘Tweet Café’, a novel concept, where you tweeted your order and received a number when your order was ready to be collected from the box of that number.
Furthermore, the newly dominant tech industries of India and China were represented at the summit. Whether it was investors looking for opportunities or speakers such as the chairman of ‘360Buy.com’, the largest ecommerce website in China, the complement of cultures looks to bring about positive developments for the Irish tech industry in the global market looking forward to the future of ecommerce tech. Of course, there is already ecommerce technology that is available to businesses these days. Some of this technology can benefit an ecommerce business significantly. For example, a lot of ecommerce stores have already been looking into chargeback prevention services to ensure customers can process returns and refunds without the company losing money. That is just one example of the innovative technology services that are available to ecommerce stores these days.
DWS teamed up with ESB for the ‘Spark of Genius’ awards where a panel of judges listened to around 50 start-up businesses pitch their ideas to compete for over €40,000 in cash and services to support their nascent efforts. The acumen on display was astounding and the range of ideas simply staggering. One example was ‘Vocalytics’ – a company working on developing mobile voice analysis. The software helps you perfect your speech for persuasion, demonstration or other purposes by sampling your speech or talk and giving you feedback on your tone, pitch, pauses and more. Another was ‘boxPAY’ – a company that allows you to make small purchases online using your mobile phone so a credit card is not required. A useful tool considering more than twice as many people have mobile phones as do credit cards. The winners were ‘Redeem and Get’ – a start-up helping websites manage special offers for their users.
Within the summit was the exclusive ‘F.ounders’ Event for web entrepreneurs to gather and chat with their peers in a casual setting. They had a pub crawl followed by a dinner at our very own Trinity College.
Holding such an event was a tremendous honour for the city and a great means of exporting the good name of Dublin across the world. For two days, Dublin was the epicentre of the IT industry. This is just one way a true knowledge economy is coming to fruition. With such commitment, passion and talent as witnessed in the RDS last week, the recession doesn’t stand a chance.
