Gareth Gregan
Staff Writer
All roads lead to Dublin this week as the RDS played host to Dublin’s third annual Web Summit. An estimated 4,000 people representing 45 countries attended the event; more than double that of last year. The “who’s who” of the online world was more than fairly represented with big names such as the founder of Skype, Miles Zennstrom, and Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld present. I was a BESS student in a techy’s world. In short, I was screwed.
For me the event was a baptism of fire into the world of networking. Having managed to acquire a more than reasonably priced student-ticket through my good friends at Trinity Entrepreneurial Society I set out in earnest to rub shoulders with the brains behind the internet. I had one clear goal: to get people to notice me enough to hand me an internship for summer 2013. My first port of call was twitter, days in advance, as I began tweeting at many of the guests to announce that I would be in their midst.
While I like to believe that my intentions were admirable, it was upon arrival that I realised that the event was on a much larger scale than I could ever have anticipated and the names at whom I’d tweeted were hidden behind tags representing their companies. The main hall of the RDS, known to most of us as the place where we go to die for the month of May, was packed with start-up firms promoting their unique way of revolutionising the internet, most commonly through the medium of Apps. What an eclectic bunch the internet masterminds turned out to be. Products ranged from the genius – SmartThings: a futuristic way of utilising apps to make one’s home “smart” (see: that episode of The Simpsons where their house tries to kill them) – to the downright bizarre – Vibrease: Please. Google it.
Most of my first morning interacting with those in the start-up village; occasionally dropping out to take in some of the guest speakers. Of these Baratunde Thurston, founder of howtobeblack.net, was a personal highlight. I was forced to look twice when I saw Coderdojo prodigies Harry Moran and Alan Panayotov speak of their experience with web design. Alan (10) admitted that he “hadn’t done too much” in the realms of web coding when he signed up for the Coderdojo classes aged 9. I was very quickly feeling very old.
On top of this, I was quickly learning how to perfect my ability to network. Phrases like “Yes, I agree that Cloud Technology is the way of the future” were very quickly being added to my repertoire. Also I’d learned to leave my phone (a relic Nokia from the early “noughties”) in my pocket to avoid the inferiority complex brought on by displaying it in the ocean of iPhone 5s. I’d soon acquired more business cards than Reads of Nassau St, every one of them a link to some form of future employment.
When it came to entertainment the Summit also performed well. Titan the Robot danced, sang and sprayed water at all those who’d give him an audience. There were go-karts too for all those big techies who refuse to grow up. However, it was the evening’s entertainment which provided me with the greatest amount of enjoyment. Here I learned that techies are people too. Bonds were formed and deals secured over the multitude of free drinks on offer. Yes, it was extremely entertaining to watch the normally refined business folk maximise their one night in Dublin.
Business men cut hungover figures when they re-emerged for the second day of the summit. The main focus of the second day was the conclusion of the Electric Ireland Spark of Genius competition. By midday we had our four finalists; a group which featured crowd favourite Vibrease. However, the day belonged to SmartThings and they walked away with the €100,000 cash prize.
I like to think that the enthusiasm exhibited by those at the event rubbed off on me to some degree and one could not help feeling massively empowered when leaving the RDS for the final time. On a financial level I benefited massively from the vast array of freebies which were on offer and on a professional one from the think-tank of knowledge which attended the event.
However, I am still left with one major question, and that is… What exactly is Cloud Technology?
