A few weeks ago I attended my first Web Summit event in Dublin.
It was to be the last of its kind in its original homestead, but to be surrounded by 42,000 of the world’s digiterati, media, start-ups, VC’s and Unicorn CEO’s was certainly a new experience for me.
Here are my top 10 learnings from this behemoth digital conference:
- Big topic themes focused on Machine Learning, personalization, A.I, and how to monetize everything in digital and social
- Mobile broke the internet. The sheer scale and speed of this adoption is dramatically changing the rules of connectivity, interactivity and commerce
- The new digital lingo must mention Unicorns and Zebras…
- Don’t develop an app if it doesn’t solve a fundamental problem or answer a need
- Not all startups need to become a Unicorn and IPO. You can maintain your values and ethos and still be successful. Case in point – Kickstarter. Yancey Strickler was the best speaker I saw and he made me believe that startups could be about doing good
- We are not in a “Tech Bubble” – rather more of a rolling timeline cycle, which has peaks and plateaus but is unlikely to have a completely dot.com bust as the Tech industry will be growing 2-3x in the next 10 years
- Tinder + is currently the company’s greatest source of revenue (I’m seriously old and didn’t even know what this was…)
- Even though digital seems to dominate our lives, 90% of sales still happen offline
- I need to know more about Hyperloop. This was by far the coolest and most interesting company who presented at Web Summit http://hyperlooptech.com/
- Technology is going to change every facet of our future life, whether you want it to or not