Websummit: The Biggest Tech Event in Europe.

Every Year, WebSummit Gathers Sharks Of Industry With Start-Ups And Companies Of All Sizes. This year Business Motion was there.
Websummit

The WebSummit that Business Motion attended had about 50 000 CEO s, founders, investors. 15 000 companies of all sizes and industries from 167 countries all around the world met in Lisbon at the “largest European event of its type.

The 2016 WebSummit was a different affair from previous years, not least because it is the first year the event wasn’t held in Dublin.

Before last year’s summit, co-founder Paddy Cosgrave announced, with a publicity hype, that it’s the event’s last year in Dublin- Ireland.

The summit, organized for the first time in the year 2009, became the biggest and most important technology-related platform in Europe where participants share knowledge and experience as well as challenges and ways to overcome them. Its main goal consists of helping companies apply new innovations from the business and web technologies field.

Holding Web Summit for the first time in Lisbon wasn’t the only new thing for tech uber- entrepreneur Paddy Cosgrave.

A few weeks before the event, Cosgrave became a father for the first time. That’s why his wife Faye Dinsmore who used to be present every year in the summit, couldn’t attend the event this year.

But there were some fears that Web Summit might stumble with specific problems like Wi-Fi, as the event struggled yearly with it. Cosgrave himself faced an internet problem while trying to give an on-stage demo on an opening night. But this year, the summit had the best connectivity ever.

Regarding the number of attendees through the days of the event, observers noticed a continuous high flow all over the exhibition stalls, and seating areas were relatively still full.

As the last year’s event was reaching its end, WebSummit, criticized for its poor gender balance, launched an initiative to attract more women by offering low rates tickets and exclusive networking areas for female entrepreneurs.

Websummit

Regarding the quality of speakers, Carlos Ghosn, chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan alliance was one of them. He spoke about Everybody’s interest in the car industry because cars are moving from a means of transportation into a connected mobile space.

Pete Blackshaw CDO at Nestle said: “It’s an era where large companies need to be very very adaptive”.

Despite all, “it appears like Cosgrave might have actually built the event up to such a size that, like popular tech events CES and TechCrunch Disrupt, WebSummit could now be big enough to work anywhere. Cosgrave’s event might have become too big to fail”, TheJournal.ie.

This large annual event is a great platform to access a huge content and make global and international professional connections in the web technology business and to learn unparalleled business strategies and explore new innovations.

Business Motion attended Web Summit 2016 that was held at MEO Arena and FIL Feira Internacional de Lisboa in Lisbon- Portugal between the 7th and the 10th of November.

“We were excited to be part of this huge event. We met with the world’s leading companies in the technology field”, says the founder of Business Motion Rania Abou Nader. “We’ve been preparing for the web summit for a while. You have to have a goal and it is to gain more knowledge from the speakers and the participants and to weave a connection network” adds Rania. “What we were looking for in the summit is learning about the latest technologies, trends, strategies and techniques that could improve our business and make us understand the constantly changing consumer behavior. That’s why we participate in the latest conferences. Otherwise how could we be among the leaders in our field and stay a strong competitor? We’ve got to raise the intelligence in order to have our own wisdom. When you hear someone like Michael Litt co-founder and CEO at Vidyard, the world’s most innovative Video Marketing Platform, say: “Marketers should embrace video through their marketing strategy.”And Suchit Dash- President of Dubsmash, video messaging application for iOS and Android, say: “Video is exploding. It is a massive new trend that is here to stay”

You gain more confidence in your business and you become more motivated to improve thus providing clients with the best product and the best service”.

Rania continues: “We were mingling and networking in a vibrant community of start-ups longing to listen and learn. For us, it was an awesome chance for professional networking and new relationships. There were people representing start-ups and companies of all sizes, as well as those from the well-established usual suspects such as Google, Amazon and Facebook… and that’s what enriched our experience with non-stop learning for Business Motion.”

“When you ask the young students who are their role models, they will say Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg and clearly they are much more fascinated by what’s coming out by the very large startups and platforms, those people who can change the world”, Maurice Levy- Publicis group.

“Video is evolving so quickly particularly in more developed markets where people have better phones and higher bandwidth”, Gary Briggs- Facebook

We witnessed a massive army of participants of different nationalities in the largest Web platform ever organized in Europe”. Rania concluded: “those were the most amazing three days in which we learned loads, loved meeting everyone and made new partnerships, clients and friends. It was a truly overwhelming opportunity full of excitement”.

About Web Summit

Web Summit (originally Dublin 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 start-ups together with a range of people from across the global technology industry, as well as related industries.

Web Summit runs events throughout the world including Founders, RISE in Hong Kong, Collision in New Orleans, SURGE in Bangalore and MoneyConf in Madrid.

For the first five years the event was held in Dublin, Ireland. In September 2015 Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit co-founder and CEO, announced that Web Summit would be held in Lisbon starting 2016.

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