Our Dare to challenge team at Web Summit 2016

What is Web Summit?

Web Summit is a technology conference held annually since 2009. The company was founded by Paddy Cosgrave, David Kelly and Daire Hickey. The topic of the conference is centered on internet technology and attendees range from Fortune 500 companies to smaller tech companies. This contains a mix of CEOs and founders of tech startups together with a range of people from across the global technology industry, as well as related industries.

In November 2016 the event was held in Lisbon, at the MEO Arena and it drew 53,056 attendees from more than 150 countries and more than 1,500 start-ups spread over 21 venues. Its main moto was “women in tech”. So, this is where I was from November 7–10, working as the social media manager of a startup named Findentist.

Dare to challenge and “Safe n Sound” at W.S.

Considering all the above, one can easily understand that Web Summit is basically the “temple” of technology, media, entrepreneurship, networking, innovation. So, while socializing and scouting in the context of my job, I decided to take the opportunity to talk about our lab and of course our project.

First of all, almost everyone seemed fascinated by the idea of our class-lab, where the students can learn and develop various skills, based on their own ideas, their own innovative projects, while interacting with each other, with technology and with the social media. Also, they were really surprised by the fact that this lab runs in the context of a Greek university, considering the situation in our country.

When it came to our application, “Safe and Sound” (about which you can read in our previous posts, Charis’ and mine), the feedback and the comments were positive and rather encouraging. The first person I talked to about our project was a developer from the Netherlands. He found our idea really interesting, our goal really important and our mission kind of difficult. He was also impressed that we decided to try and find a solution to a social issue like rape and rape culture. Then, he suggested I should take a look at the Ushahidi website to find helpful ideas.

Ushahidi was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008. Since then, thousands have used their crowdsourcing tools to raise their voice. They are a technology leader in Africa, headquartered in Nairobi, with a global team. We thought we could use multiple features and ideas of Ushahidi, such as the data gathering system and the notifications via SMS.

Also, while scouting to find some interesting startup to co-operate with Findentist, I found out about Shecall. Shecall is a bracelet which listens to your heartbeat, it interacts with the mobile app and in case of an emergency, it contacts three selected people, who are automatically alerted by a message in which they find your name, a button to quickly call you and a map to know where you are and how to reach you.

I went to their exhibition stand, I talked with the CEO about our idea and he offered to help us with the alert button and the signal and notification system.

“Women in tech”

As mentioned above, this year’s Web Summit’s moto was “women in tech”. Obviously, this means that there were a lot of women at the MEO Arena. I approached as many of them as I could, I presented our idea to them and I asked them some questions, in the form of a small interview. Once again, the feedback and the comments were surprisingly good. Every single one of them would definitely use our application, they would feel much safer walking alone and they thought that both the maps and the red button feature are really useful.

Conclusion

My Web Summit experience was amazing. No doubt, this conference is indeed “Europe’s largest technology marketplace”, full of interesting people with innovative ideas, experience and skills. Therefore, I am absolutely sure and really proud of our own idea and project for gathering all these comments of excitement by these specific people.

Our team: Charis Zarbalas, Christos Daniilidis, Martha Davari, Asimina Christodoulatou, Danai Lyratzi, Frossini Drakouli

Our teacher/mentor: Betty Tsakarestou