We’re at the sixth and largest Dublin Web summit today in the RDS, Dublin and will be live blogging the entire day’s proceedings. With a great lineup of speakers onboard and almost 1,000 of the world’s leading entrepreneurs, investors, business leaders and media organisations pledging attendance to this summer summit, it’s hard not to be inspired.
Schedule
| Time | Speaker/title |
|---|---|
| 12:00 | Registration |
| 12.30-14:00 | BBQ lunch & networking |
| 13:50 | Welcome address |
| 14.15 | Sam Barnett – Struq |
| 14.30 | iGap – The next wave of Irish disruption |
| 14.45 | Eamon Leonard – Orchestra |
| 15.00 | Jennifer O’Connell – TheJournal.ie |
| 15.15 | Emi Gal – Brainient |
| 15.30 | Break |
| 15.35 | Tariq Krim – Jolicloud |
| 15.50 | Mike Downey – Microsoft |
| 16.05 | Mike Butcher – TechCrunch |
| 16.20 | Marcus Segal – Zynga |
| 16.40 | Closing remarks |
| 16.45 | Talks end |
| 16-45-19:00 | Drinks and networking |
You can also stay updated by following us on Twitter if you prefer.
Live blog
Segal: Concludes talk.
Segal: Personally interviewed and hired over 600 people at Zynga
Segal: Creating culture of recognition in management is key
Segal: Zynga core values – build games people love to play, be a CEO, level up, Zynga speed, work at Zynga first, and innovate.
Segal: Talking about styles of management and their impact on productivity
Segal: Must have specific measurable goals
Segal: Thanks IDA for helping establish new Zynga office in Dublin. Crowd applauds.
Segal: 44 million farmers, 500 million acres of land farmed in FarmVille. 5 million virtual business in CityVille. 400,000 people playing Zynga Poker at any given time.
Segal: Zynga games are “a new form of entertainment”.
Segal: New Zynga game Empires and Allies. Now fastest growing game. Zynga games are played by 250 million people every month.
Segal: Terrified at being keynote speaker. Will talk about managing.
Next and final speaker for today is Marcus Segal. Segal is COO of Game Studio Operations at Zynga. Zynga are a billion dollar social gaming company that produce the hugely popular FarmVille, CityVille, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker games to name but a few. Zynga was founded in January 2007 and since then have experience tremendous growth. Growth that is undoubtedly fueled in part by Facebook’s phenominal acquisition rate of loyal and engaged users, but also as a result of the companies own ability to captivate such audiences and profit from this. Zynga have their European headquarters in Dublin.
Butcher: TechHub events will help expose Ireland
Butcher: Are we in a media bubble? Moved to blogs because he knew print would be in trouble. News curation, aggregation is part of the future.
Butcher: How to get coverage on TechCrunch? Get pitched all the time. Have to stand out. Keep it short, create story of what you’re doing.
Butcher: No bubble in Europe! 1,000 attendee realising potential of web.
Butcher: Are we in another tech bubble? Public markets bubble. Infrastructure wasn’t there in .COM bubble but now it almost is.
Now on stage is Mike Butcher. Butcher is editor of TechCrunch Europe. Mike has been involved in journalism for a long time, writing for many British newspapers and magazines, including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Recently, Mike has also appeared on the BBC’s The Apprentice show. He has gathered many awards during his ongoing career in journalism. In 2000, Mike was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year and in 1998 TechCrunch Europe, under Butcher’s reign, was awarded best Web 2.0 and Business Blog in the UK by Computer Weekly magazine.
Downey: Goal is to create best open-source video player. First release coming in July.
Downey’s talk is quite tech heavy
Downey: Oops, Downey refers to Silverlight as Safari, crowd laughs
Downey: 10 million Kinect devices sold so far.
Downey: 49.2% of internet traffic is streaming media. 29.7% of downstream traffic in the US comes from Netflix alone.
Downey: Silverlight is amazing way to build rich media applications like video
Downey: Windows 8 – adds support for HTML5 apps
Downey: Windows Phone 7 “Mango” update coming later this year. 500 new features including IE9.
Downey: IE10 will introduce many new CSS3 features
Downey: JavaScript is grade equaliser for development
Downey: IE9 really focusing to make browser standards compliant. Made graphics, text and video hardware accelerated to load pages really fast
Downey: IE9 show of hands, not many
Downey: Will focus on HTML5 in presentation
Next up is Mike Downing. Downey is director of platform evangelism at Microsoft where his main focus is Microsoft Silverlight. Prior to this Mike was an evangelist at Adobe, focusing on similar technologies; Flash, Flex and AIR. Downey has a long history and many years experience developing web software and mobile applications for the delivery of rick media.
Krim: Electronic manufacturing is a monopoly. Innovation is in software.
Krim: Apple has control on supply chain regarding the production of electronic devices
Krim: Silicon Valley can be replicated anywhere long as the appropriate workforce is available in that location
Tariq Krim is speaking on stage now with Paddy Cosgrave. Krim is founder and CEO of JoliCloud. The service launched in 2008 and allows users to manage web apps, files and services from one dashboard within a web browser (similar to what Google Chrome OS). Krim also founded netvibes.com in 2005, a personal dashboard housed within a web browser that allows users to monitor Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and their favourite websites all from one place. In 2008 he was nominated a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and is also the first French person to be awarded Top 35 Young Innovators Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review.
Apologies for delay but experiencing internet connectivity issues
@electricireland giving away an iPad 2
Short break almost over, proceedings about to begin again
Gal: Talk ends.
Gal: Video advertising will be massive
Gal: Describes how young girl expected video to be interactive on iPad. Clicking video won’t not reveal subjects name.
Gal: Personalisation doubles CTR rate
Gal: Relevance is key in video advertising
Gal: With Brainient tried to understand what main problems in video advertising industry are and try to solve these
Gal: Annoying YouTube overlays are here to stay
Gal: Will talk about video advertising
Emi Gal now on stage. Gal is the twenty-five year old founder and CEO of Brainient – a London-based company that helps advertisers increase the ROI of their campaigns. The Romanian entrepreneur has been actively involved in a number of start-ups, including Skimbit / Skimlinks, eOk, BrainTV, and iHireyou. Emi also occasionally contributes to The Telegraph and TechCrunch.
O’Connell: Stepping down as editor of TheJournal.ie but staying involved. Susan Daly taking over as new editor next Tuesday. Talk ends.
O’Connell: 55,000 iPhone app downloads. First year traffic targets breached in first four months.
O’Connell: Story about Darren Gibson quitting Twitter is highest traffic spike for one article with 203,000 pageviews
O’Connell: First massive spike came in September when Conor Lenihan launched his book. An influential tweet crashed the site.
O’Connell: Designe product with demography in mind. This includes the 9 at 9, the daily poll, Take 5 at 5pm and The Daily Fix at 8pm.
O’Connell: Tested site first on family and friends. September 2010, limited invite only trial. October 2010, full beta trial. Social media users would be core audience. 52,000 Facebook friends, 15,000 Twitter followers. Two platform must be treated differently. Twitter is less intrusive so can be updated more frequently.
O’Connell: Wanted the ability to share and shape news with TheJournal.ie
O’Connell: What is news? Answer not so straight forward now. Demise of single, all-knowing source. Readers travel from one source to another. News has become a conversation. Social media not just platform for breaking news, but engaging with it.
O’Connell: Aggregation “helps readers navigate the vast news landscape”.
O’Connell: Site model – 50% aggregated / 50% original content
O’Connell: The big idea with TheJournal.ie? Ireland’s first fully interactive news website. Making news around shared experiences. 24/7 news.
O’Connell: Daft.ie built up from Transitional Year project which came second!
O’Connell: Begins talking about how TheJournal.ie started. Given opportunity to shape start-up from scratch.
Next speaker is Jennifer O’Connell. Jennifer is the founding editor of Ireland online-only news site TheJournal.ie which launched in October of last year. She is also a weekly columnist for The Sunday Business Post. O’Connell has fifteen years experience across varying media forms, including the RTÉ News and senior producer with Liberty Films.
Eamon Leonard concludes his talk.
Leonard: Software is more like live gigs that studio recorded albums. Live gigs allows for evolution of start-up and its software.
Leonard: Best bands go global. Irish are unfortunately reluctant to go global. Build with global in mind.
Leonard: Best bands have been playing music from a early age. Same applies for founders of tech start-ups.
Leonard: Draw parallels to learn lessons from mistakes of others
Leonard: Copycats start-ups are like boy bands
Leonard: Draws parallels between computer geeks and music geeks
Leonard: Start-ups are focused solely at job in hand.
Leonard: Community is crucial in tech / start-up industry
Leonard: Commends developer community in Dublin and Ireland
Leonard: Developer since late 90s. Side project Orchestra spinning out as new company this year.
Up next Eamon Leonard. Eamon Leonard is a Dublin native and co-founder and CEO of Orchestra – a PHP platform for deploying, scaling and managing PHP applications. Leonard is also co-founder of CloudSplit and co-founder and managing director of echolibre. He’s been writing code for the past twelve years and has worked closely with twenty start-ups since 2008 through his work at echolibre.
@paddycosgrave talking about ESB Electric Ireland Spark of Genius programme
Roe: 600 customer, doubling every year, 75% of which choose to renew yearly
Roe: Trying to be trusted brand in elective healthcare industry
Roe: “We actively follow up every customer query”
David Roe from WhatClinic.com takes to the stage
Groarke: ExamSpeak beta product officially launched today at #dws6
Groarke: 5m students per year must pass exams to gain access to US/UK/Canada
Groarke: Imagine a world where students can interact with other students virtually
Paul Groarke from RendezVu now on stage.
Ní Raghallaigh: Demoing Tunspresto video. Talk finishes.
Ní Raghallaigh: 45 minutes of video uploaded every minute on YouTube
Ní Raghallaigh: Tunepresto analyses video and produces unique piece of music to match video style
Ní Raghallaigh: Dream solution is web-based and copyright free – Tunepresto
Ní Raghallaigh: Adding background music to video is a pain
Siún Ní Raghallaigh from Tune Presto on stage
Perceval: Today official launching Zanadoo beta
With Zanadoo people love to book into salons onlines
Ronon Perceval talking on stage now. He is CEO of Phorest – described as the OpenTable of the hair and beauty industry
Barnett: Vision for company evolves. Once vision is being realised, one is not bound by limititations
Sam Barnett talks about his company Struq
First speaker Sam Barnett has now taken to the stage.
Paddy takes to the stage
Organiser Paddy Cosgrave introducing the event
Big shout out to @paddycosgrave to organising today’s event
Jazz band playing on stage
Most attendees have taken their seats at this stage, #dws6 is about to kick-off