In less than a week, one of the world’s largest tech conferences, Web summit, will take place in Dublin. We are really proud that Responster will be exhibiting there as an Alpha startup. In this post, we want to share with you what Web summit is, and what to expect from it. Perhaps you’ll also have the opportunity of being there and in that case, we’d love to meet you (you’ll find information about where to find us further down in the post).
Web summit At a Glance
Web summit started back in 2010 as a 500-person event for the local Irish tech community. Over the coming years, Web summit has grown into a world know tech conference that attracts some of the biggest names in the industry. Last year over 10.000 people from over 90 countries attended Web summit over two days. The conference had 695 early stage startups exhibiting, 150 startup pitches, 149 growth stage startup companies exhibiting, over 400 international investors and 400 international journalists & bloggers. Among the 300+ speakers Elon Musk, Shane Smith and Tony Hawk attended.
That’s quite some expansion from 2010.
It’s 2014 And Web Summit is Bigger Than Ever
It’s not strange that Web summit has become known as “the best technology conference on the planet”. This year’s conference is held between the 4th and the 6th of November. More than 500 speakers will take it to the stage during three days. There will be four different Summits all dedicated to spreading thoughts and ideas from the four biggest areas of business and tech. 20,000 people will be attending with one goal in common – to share knowledge.
The Four Summits
Let’s take a quick look at the four different summits: enterprise summit, builders summit, machine summit and marketing summit.
Enterprise Summit
The enterprise summit will gather some of the best founders and CEOs from all around the world. Attendees to the speaker sessions will learn how enterprise companies are adopting new technologies and innovations to their industry in order to improve our everyday life. Among the speakers that will attend are Ryan Smith (Qualtrics, CEO), Sarah Robb O’Hagan (Equinox, President) and Jim Bankoff (Vox Media, CEO).
Builders Summit
Builders summit will showcase developers, coders, creators, companies and startups that are building the latest technology. Attendees will be able to exchange ideas and learn from each other. Some of the persons that will speak during the builders summit are Werner Vogels (Amazon, CTO), Anna Patterson (Google, VP of Engineering) and Zach Sims (Codecademy, Founder).
Machine Summit
This is where the Internet of Things thrive. Companies from all over the world will meet and showcase everyday products that are connected to the Internet, something that will truly redefine how we interact with them. Two of the speakers that will take it to the stage are Alex Hawkinson (SmartThings, CEO + Founder) and Ayah Bdeir (littleBits, Founder + CEO).
Marketing Summit
Marketing summit will focus on talks and discussion on how we interact with digital content. Thought leaders in the industry will share their ideas on how advertising constantly is evolving, and how we as receivers react to it. Three persons, that will be seen during marketing summit, are Drew Houston (Dropbox, Founder + CEO), John Engates (Rackspace, CTO) and Justin Rosenstein (Asana, Co-Founder).
Exhibiting as an Alpha Startup at the Web Summit
Now that you know a little more what Web summit is about you still might wonder what Responster will do there? Well, about one month ago we go the great news that we had been offered an exhibition stand as an Alpha Startup. This means that we will showcase Responster among many other great startups from around the world. Have a look at the image below to see how the Alpha exhibition looked like last year.
Going to Web summit will give us the opportunity to meet a lot of like-minded people. We look forward to showing Responster to these people and spreading the word about what we do! It will also be really interesting to see what all of the other startups work with.
We’ll exhibit in the Enterprise area during Day 1. If you have the opportunity of being there during that day we’d love to meet you. You’ll find us at stand number ETP130 and the exhibition area is in Simmonscourt. Have a look at this map of Simmonscourt so you know where to find us!
We suggest that you head over to Web summit’s own blog for further reading, they’ve covered a lot of topics over the last months. There’s also a full schedule posted here with information on what happens on the different stages during the conference.
We’ll share a lot of pictures during our visit at Web summit, make sure that you follow us on Twitter and Facebook so that you don’t miss out on anything.
Take care,
Ludvig