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Fitness wearable creator Fitbit is in the process of acquiring smartwatch maker Pebble in a deal that will likely spell the end of the Pebble brand. VentureBeat has learned that the sale price will be between $34 million and $40 million. Pebble had some problems recently, but more about the deal here. Meanwhile, real estate startup OpenDoor received huge $210 million Series D investment from Norwest Venture partners. With the new capital, the company wants to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes, Techcrunch points out. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project home resale value are complicated, the experience for buyers and sellers is fairly streamlined. And let's talk about closing venture funds. Accel India has closed its fifth fund with $450 million, roughly two years after closing its fourth fund with $325 million, read about it here. Singapore’s Jungle Ventures today confirmed the final close of its newest $100 million fund for investments in Southeast Asia. Founder Collective, the seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based seed-stage venture fund, has closed its third fund with $75 million in capital from a small group of limited partners whose anchor investors are the the firm’s three partners: David Frankel, Micah Rosenbloom and Eric Paley. Three members Genesis Partners are starting a new venture fund. F2 Capital, founded by Eddy Shalev, Jonathan “Jonny” Saacks and Barak Rabinowitz, is in the midst of closing a $50 million debut fund to back seed stage companies. And finally, after raising $300 million from Volkswagen earlier this year, on-demand ride service Gett is getting another tranche of financing. Today the company announced that it has secured a $100 million, seven-year loan facility from Russia’s Sberbank.

In line with the most interesting news from the day, we'll share with you the stories that matter in the business and technology. Webit.Festival speaker Francois Chopard and his venture fund called Starburst Ventures has raised a $200 million debut fund to invest in early stage aerospace startups over the next three years. The fund is an extension of the Starburst Accelerator, which was founded in 2012 to help aviation and aerospace tech startups raise seed funding, and score their first big deal with a corporate customer, typically representing $1 million or more in revenue. Read more about it here. Meanwhile, one of the few remaining alternative mobile OS platforms, Jolla’s Sailfish OS, made a deal with the Russian government. Today the Finnish company which develops and maintains the core code, with the aim of licensing it to others, announced Sailfish has achieved domestic certification in Russia for government and corporate use. More about the alternative of Android, here. One in five people have suffered from depression, one in two will suffer some other mental disturbance in their lifetimes. If you haven’t been through a mental health issue, you will likely know someone who has. After encountering it in amongst those closest to her, former international model Silja Litvin decided to do something about it, launching a special app. Learn more about it here. A new joint venture between major carmakers will attempt to make it easier to get around Europe using electric cars, thanks to a network of chargers with up to 350 kW charging capacity, which could drastically reduce overall charging times compared to what’s available today. The team-up includes BMW, Daimler, Ford and Volkswagen, and plans for roll-out of the fast-charging stations call for installations to start in 2017. Read about it here. Mobileye and Delphi announced a partnership to build an affordable self-driving car platform it could sell to automakers starting in 2019 earlier this year, and now Intel is joining the two automative suppliers to provide the chips used in their autonomous system.

Have a look at some of the interesting news from today, regarding the tech and business world. First of all, we should point out the 100 million euro raised by Devialet,  the French developer of high-end speakers and the IP behind the sound systems that make them go boom.  The investment comes from Foxconn, Jay-Z, Rubin's Playground and even more investors. See more about it here. And let's talk about wireless VR, sounds like a fantasy, right? Well, the researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) may have a solution in MoVr, a wireless virtual reality system. Instead of using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to transmit data, the research team’s MoVR system uses high-frequency millimeter wave radio to stream data from a computer to a headset wirelessly at dramatically faster speeds than traditional technology. Learn more about it here. Meanwhile,  one of the hedge fund industry's hottest new funds is betting on Disney. Samantha Greenberg's Margate Capital Management is investing in Walt Disney Company – even as many peers are shedding the stock. If you want to see more about the interesting investment, click here. Proficio, a cybersecurity startup specializing in managed detection and response (MDR) services, has raised $12 million in a round led by Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. More about it here. About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg. Contact: Aniela Russeva

aniela@webitcongress.com

   

Meet the founder Nadine Levitt and her Wurrly, helping you turn your phone into a professional recording studio. 300 000 users with 1.5 million recording sessions did it already.

Nadine Levitt, who will be speaking during Webit.Festival 2017, is a professional opera singer and if the name doesn’t ring any bells in your mind, you should know that she performed on one stage with people like Steven Tyler, David Foster, Christina Perri and Roger Daltry. So, she decided to create Wurrly, trying to erase some of the barriers for entry in the professional music world. Wurrly is an app, which transforms your phone into a recording studio – easy to use and delivering HQ records of performances on it. That’s an easy way to record good performances without paying huge sums for studio time. All you have to do is download Wurrly. “Location and economic differences should not be a barrier to entry for self-expression,” says Nadine about her try to disrupt the sector.

So here is the answer : because more than 80 % of all jobs and professions will be totally transformed within next 5-10 years. And we have to be ready so to take the advantage. It's not bad – it's just challenging and since yo read this and attend Webit – you will be among the prepared once.

And if you are still not impressed, Wurrly had already collaborated with the 'Lip Sync Battle’show, hosted by LL Cool J and airing on Spike TV. As we all know, celebrities appear on the show lip-syncing worldwide hits for the amusement of the audience. This is the place, where Channing Tatum is channeling Beyoncé, Joseph Gordon-Levitt can be seen performing as Janet Jackson, Anne Hathaway as Miley Cyrus and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson searching for his inner Taylor Swift personality. The app is based exactly on Wurrly’s engine and will help fans of the show record themselves and this way become part of the fun, challenging each other to a lip-sync duel. For just one year, Wurrly has tracked more than 1.5 million recording sessions and over 300,000 users. So, Nadine can really tell us more about her way of changing ways music is made, we are really impatient to hear more on the topic. About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg. Contact: Aniela Russeva

aniela@webitcongress.com

Keeping you in touch with the latest news from tech and business world, these are the stories we want to show you today:   1. With Thanksgiving Day in full swing, many are turning to the internet to get their holiday shopping started. Adobe is tracking e-commerce transactions in real time, and it said that by 5pm Eastern time online retailers had clocked up $1.15 billion in sales, up 13.6% on a year ago.  You can read more about it here. 2. Twitter's Anthony Noto is getting a hefty stock package worth up to $12 million per year to take on a larger role as Chief Operating Officer of the struggling internet company.  You can read more about it here. 3. Secretive big data firm Palantir Technologies  raised another 20 million dollars. The $20 million figure is a curiously low amount for a company that led an $880 million round of funding last December, has raised more than $2 billion total, and is said to be valued at $20 billion as a whole. More about it here. 4. Imagine a laptop you don't need to charge for over a year. This could become reality after engineers from the University of Cambridge have created an ultra low power transistor that can run for a long time without a power source. More about it here. 5. The founding story of Spectacles — how a small glasses startup that struggled to raise money turned into the future of $25 billion Snapchat. Read more about Erick Miller here. 

BASSCOM, the industry association of leading Bulgarian software development companies, presented today its annual report on the IT industry in the country. Among the guests during the press conference was Mrs Aniela Russeva, Senior Vice President of the Webit Global Series.

Georgi Zahariev, member of the Managing Board of BASSCOM, pointed out that the annual turnover of the members of the association is now over 1 billion US Dollars. Another interesting fact is the growth of the software industry in Bulgaria – 16.9% for 2015, 5 times more the growth of the country’s GDP. The members of BASSCOM also reported 278 milion leva of paid taxes during the last year. Outsourcing companies have a growth of 21% during 2015 – 217 million leva – an all-time record for the country. The people, working in the industry, are 19 000 and that makes it one of the most effective in the country. BASSCOM provided information that the salaries in the industry are 4 times bigger than the average in Bulgaria.

BASSCOM is a long term partner of the Global Webit Series of events and they both as communities support the growth of the market and industry and help the establishment of Bulgaria as a hub for the region of CEE, which already was proven by the title given to Sofia as The Digital Capital of the New Markets by Forbes after last edition of Webit in Sofia. BASSCOM also stated that in all industries there is already a need of IT specialists since all businesses are now transforming or started to adapt to the digital economy. Thus BASSCOM also announced a launch of special pilot of educational programme for IT specialists that will start not in the Universities but in the secondary school. First results will be visible on the market in the near future, when more young people will be ready to be part of the continuing growth of the industry in the country. We expect more companies to relocate their operations for the CEE region in Bulgaria as we have all the ingredients needed.

About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here.

No, it’s JetPack man. He will fly over Webit Festival 5000+ attendees! And not not by plane! He will just fly! Watch out because David Mayman, the creator of “The World’s First True Jetpack” and CEO of JetPack Aviation is coming to Webit.Festival’2017! And who knows - maybe will do a storm by landing on scene by his untraditional vehicle. Have you ever wanted to fly? Maybe as a child you’ve wanted to fly with a pair of wings, to see all the beauty that birds see from above and to feel the ultimate freedom of the sky? Then real adults life comes and you learn you can only fly by plane, or eventually parachute or something else of the kind. But David Mayman, one of our great speakers, didn’t settle and worked hard to make flying possible nowadays. “I've always dreamt of creating and flying a jetpack - to me this is the ultimate expression of flight - no wings, minimal airframe and very compact.”, he says. If you have recently heard of that vertically flying man in New York, London, and Monaco but you still don’t believe it, you can trust us, he’s real. “It really is like having a motorcycle or a bicycle in the air.” by his own words. Not only he proves flying is possible, but what’s more, he thinks he can teach you, even if you have never piloted a plane before. David is a professional pilot with a curious career path combining aviation, internet technologies and commerce but he have always found real passion in aircraft. He devoted 25 years of discovering the ultimate freedom feeling by creating “The World’s First True Jetpack” - light enough to be carried by a man and small enough to fit in a car. David have completed more than 400 test and a couple of real flights, armed only with his Jetpack on back. The most recent model ot JetPack, JB-9, could reach 10,000 feet (3,050 metres) and a highest speed of 102 km/h with duration of the flight for about 10 minutes, says JetPack Aviation. The company wants to raise £300,000 in order to invest in further research and development for its JB-10 JetPack and VTOL aircraft. And if today JetPack flying symbolises distant future, Mr Mayman says will work hard to create a commercial use JetPack so that one day JetPack could be a usual way of hanging around used by next generations. About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg. Contact: Aniela Russeva

aniela@webitcongress.com

Do you like playing games and winning? Founders games is about business though! Founders games is a unique chance for a startup to win 200 000 euro seed investment.  Webit Foundation receives thousands of applications for each Founders Games contest around the world at all Webit events in Europe, Asia, MIddle East… Startups apply and if approved at first and second stage, they receive the opportunity to exhibit for free at a Startup village and pitch on one of the stages at Webit Festival. Then after two days of live pitches the jury selects 5 among all pitching startups, that are around 200 normally. And these 5 go on the big stage and participate in the ceremony of Founders Games, where in front of our Final jury - a group of successful entrepreneurs, credible investors and inspiring business angels, they prove why their business is the one that should receive 200 000 euro seed investment. The stirring competition at Webit Festival 2016 was won by AdGuard, a software for any device, blocking annoying ads, online tracking and protecting computer from malware. Check out the other finalists here. At Webit Foundation we see great ideas appear every day. But we also know how hard it is to make someone believe and invest in your idea. We also believe that it’s not only about investment but it’s more about real business opportunities that enterprises may provide because they need you. They need to innovate through collaboration with startups and this is what we do for them. We are not a startup event - they are so many and we are not - we have never been such. As international media call us, Webit is - the most friendly for startups ENTERPRISE event! And we know it works - we have been called “crazy“ 7 years ago when we started to mix “white shirts” and T-shirt guys and girls that drink beer during the events. And yes, we were enough crazy to prove the case and now already it's a world well known mechanism for not only events but also for exchange of innovations. Your company is eligible if you’re active in the following disciplines: Advertising, Biotech, Digital Commerce, Digital Entertainment, eLearning, Fintech, Games, Hardware, Health, Infrastructure, Money, Non-Profit, Social & dating, Travel, Xaas, Energy Efficiency, Space, Mobility, IoE. If not among these maybe you tell us rising new category? Please share! The 5 major milestones defining the finalists and the winner are: Team capacity, Project Scalability, Business approach, Marketing approach, Uniqueness of the idea. If you get selected just book your stay in Sofia - digital capital of the new markets and it will be three days of fun in the city called among top 10 cities to live in Europe! Every year the Webit Global series of events gathers one of the largest global communities of people inspired by technology and driving digital transformation in business and in the society. Uniting speakers, attendees, exhibitors and participants, we create a platform for dialogue between policy makers, enterprise and entrepreneurs. Apply here and show us you’re the best! We bet you can! *** About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, 25-27 April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions, startup village with selected from around the world startups.    The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and supported by the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit, Smart Cities Summit, New Economy Leader's Summit, Startup Village, Pitch stage and number of workshops and round table discussions, Night Urban Summit with 60 + meetups on different topics that will gather people to network by interest and explore Night Sofia! The agenda for the founders includes conferences, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg .

Digital health is among the topics at Webit Festival - it starts with the champion of new technology in medicine Dr Shafi Ahmed who will show how virtual and augmented reality can revolutionize surgical education and training.

One of the first confirmed speakers for Webit.Festival 2017 in Sofia is Dr Shafi Ahmed - pioneer in the use of virtual reality during surgeries. In fact, he is the first person in the world to live-stream an operation using Google Glass. If you want to hear more from him about this, you will see him on stage during Webit.Festival 2017 from 25-27 April in Sofia. Next year’s edition of the festival promises to bring more than 5000 attendees along with the top executives from world’s most renowned companies, investors, hottest startups and policy makers. Going back to Dr Ahmed, he is world known as one of the best general and colorectal surgeons, operating at The Royal London Hospital. In 2007, he was appointed as a Consultant General, Colorectal and Laparoscopic Surgeon at Barts and the London NHS trust. But the thing he is most popular for is the world’s first live-stream of an operation using Google Glass, which was watched live by 13000 students around the world. Dr Ahmed is also the founder of Medical Realities - an innovative group offering medical training products, specializing in virtual reality, augmented reality and serious games. By using consumer-level virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift, Medical Realities can reduce the cost of training, reach a wider audience and provide a completely safe learning environment for medical students. This is a whole new way of education for students, who can take the role of a surgeon and see through his eyes how is the surgery performed. This approach could make healthcare more equitable, making the training of surgeons worldwide a lot better. All you need is a virtual reality headset and you don’t have to travel abroad to train yourself, which is in fact a huge expense. “Surgery has always been learned through apprenticeship. Students must spend time in an operating theatre to get quality training from a mentor. While hospitals have got bigger and surgery has improved, the theatre space around the patient is still limited and it is difficult to provide everyone with a good view. VR lets every student learn from the best seat at the operating table”, says the doctor in one of his interviews. The next step is the development of devices which imitate the physical contact between the user and computer. There are companies developing various gloves or bodysuits which can replicate touch and feel. Dr Ahmed thinks that this devices could be ready for use in 3 to 5 years and they will be the next addition in this new way of education for surgeons. Of course, to know more about his thoughts on the subject, we will have to wait till April and his speech during Webit.Festival. About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg. Contact: Aniela Russeva

aniela@webitcongress.com