Day 18 — Looking Back on Web Summit 2019
What is Web Summit?
Web Summit is a technical conference held once a year in Lisbon, Portugal. Originally started in Dublin, Ireland in 2009, the conference was moved to Lisbon after 2017, gradually expanding its scale and attracting attention as one of the world’s largest gatherings.
What makes Web Summit stand out?
The world’s largest startup trade fair
Along with world-famous Tech Giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, numerous startups also run booths at the Web summit. Aside from the booths, there are several places for startups to make an open pitch to investors, so you can observe a lot of pitches during the event. Everywhere I went, it was very lively that I felt as if I walking around Tsukiji Market.
Engineer-led, Data-driven event
Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave informs that they are not a general type of event production company, but more like an “Event-tech company”. In fact, half of the 200 staffs are data scientists, cognitive science researchers, and engineers familiar with machine learning.
During the event, they analyzed the traffic data at the venue and user activity within the official app to make use of it to improve the floor traffic and engineering serendipity for the attendees.
Multi-functional mobile app
Web Summit has developed its own official app that is of very high quality and with multi-functions. It has a lot of things as far as I can tell, and it’s still improving.
- Admission pass
- Search attendees
- Create a personalized schedule
- Scan attendee lanyards to connect
- People Suggestions based on the profile
- Real-time transcription services for all sessions
So how was Web Summit this year?
Here are some of the personal highlights of this year’s Web Summit.
Keynote speech from Edward Snowden
One of the first-day keynote speech was made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, at the Centre stage. Actually, he didn’t appear in-person on stage (given his circumstances), instead spoke via video chat from somewhere in Russia.
He warned about the vulnerability of our data and the current efforts to protect our privacy from tech giants is not enough and called for taking action relevant to this age of Big data. Snowden’s speech was a little surprising for me because I’ve rarely seen this kind of topic at any IT conferences in Japan. This is probably because that kind of threat caused by data collection has not yet come up as a serious risk in Japan, but rather the positive aspects of data utilization, such as improving recommendation function or SEO, are still simply accepted. So I assume that’s why it’s unlikely for this to be a hot topic in the current Japanese IT conference.
While walking around the venue, I found that data management was one of the key topics of this event, along with AI and 5G. For instance, there were some voting spaces asking visitors about it.
Other sessions
Let me refer a bit to other sessions too, but most of them might be designing or branding-related sessions because of my personal preference.
Data addiction: AI and the future of design
UI and the future of the customer experience
Is design thinking overrated? How Garmin survived disruption
Design without borders: The future of globalization and the industry
Why the future belongs only to the imaginative
Who seems to be a perfect fit for Web summit?
I’d like to highly recommend you to attend the Web Summit if you want to. . .
- be inspired by promising startups from around the world
- know about the impact of upcoming technology on our lives
- connect with various people across countries and industries
Is English required?
Yes and No. To fulfill the above mentioned goals, a certain level of English skills will be necessary if you are not an advanced English speaker. I felt I was not able to obtain much information I would have liked to during the event due to my lack of English proficiency. However, that doesn’t mean there is no point for you in attending the summit. For example, if you find some interesting sessions with a single speaker, I think you can somehow understand what they are talking about because their session will most likely be supported by helpful slides. Anyway, don’t worry, I’d like to encourage you to go if you are interested in this conference.
Finally, let me say thank you to my colleagues Yuri and Jazz who invited me to Web Summit this time and Go-san who helped me a lot at Lisbon.
Thank you all for reading this far.
This article is part of the HENNGE Advent Calendar 2019. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. HENNGE Advent Calendar 2019 presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2019
