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In the digital world we live in we get information about what is happening around the globe literally on every second. In an information environment like that the task of running a newspaper may seem almost impossible, especially if you want to reach the young audiences and Мillennials in general. But there are more than several examples around the world of successful symbiosis between the old school analytical journalism and the fast lane news reporting using the tools that digital technology gives us. During this year’s Webit.Festival Europe our guest had the chance to listen to the Global Entertainment Director of Telegraph Media Group talking about the customer journey through creative content and the right balance between engagement and scale in the media industry nowadays. Parkinson has over 20 years experience in all aspects of Marketing and Distribution in the UK and International film distribution industry. Starting her career in the marketing department of the legendary Palace Pictures and then going on to roles as Promotions Manager at United International Pictures followed by 11 years as Head of Film across the Emap portfolio. Denise's most recent roles have included Director of International Marketing for Europe, Middle East and Africa for Disney, ABC and ESPN Television and Global Entertainment Director for Yahoo! Recently she was asked by The Telegraph to develop the film category of their news. Now she works closer with the movie studios, while her work is increasing the revenue and contend on all communication channels of the 200-years old newspaper. Expanding a media institution like The Telegraph to reach the digital audience is definitely not an easy task. The newspaper is a classic broadsheet with conservative analysis and old school media approach. But now its movie section is reaching the mass public, making the studios happy and getting a big part of their revenue through promotion campaigns. That level of success required a complete reform in the way the media is producing content that work seamlessly with its digital and print products. And while the newspaper may look like a conservative broadsheet, the app is bright,visual and simple to use and give us the option to choose only the content we want to see and get notifications about the breaking news in the respective categories.

“This segment is about the consumer journey. It’s so hard to get cut through now and get stand through. It’s so hard to get people to go to the movie, when there is Netflix and Amazon and so many enticements to just stay at home and watch on your tablet”, Parkinson said.

Today, The Telegraph is not just a quality newspaper for the British public, but a 360 degrees publisher with global reach through online website, mobile app and print edition. It has 22.5 monthly users. 6.7 million of them are reading news on a desktop computer, 4.4 million in print and 16.6 on various devices, so the mobile is really the growth area for the future. And while the media is publishing some premium content as part of its monetization strategy, 80% of the content is free and easy to access for the user. If you want in-depth analysis from any of The Telegraph’s columnists on sport, politics, entertainment, lifestyle etc., you need to pay a small monthly fee to access the premium sections of the newspaper online editions. With that, you also get subscribers benefits and unique opportunities, including even red carpet experiences. [caption id="attachment_5028" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Global Entertainment Director at Telegraph Media Group Denise Parkinson[/caption] For the last several years The Telegraph established itself as the go to media when searching information about upcoming movies with its exclusive content and innovative Omni-channel approach.

“We are number 1 for cinema goers. That means that we have more cinema goers engaging with our brands than our competition. This is really important message to send to the film studios and to work with them on their promotions. We have a young audience. So for an old newspaper that has got a conservative tone and voice it’s really fantastic to know that we index much higher with youth audience more than you would expect. We actually have more users than Buzzfeed”, Parkinson said.

As an example of the 360 degrees approach of the media she pointed out the exclusive interview with the Hollywood star Adam Driver. The Telegraph ran an online competition and gave its audience a chance to come to the interview, watch the film “Paterson” before its official premiere and meet the actor in person. Right now Adam Driver is really huge star because of his role as Kylo Ren in the reboot of the Star Wars saga and this kind of award is very interesting for the readers. The interview was streamed live for the people, who couldn’t win the tickets. According to Parkinson this is a complete integrated promotion that fits the distributor’s every need. Because they get a lot of pre-promotion, when the media was promoting the competition, that happened about 2 weeks before the film was released. And just a few days before the premiere the live interview happened. That interview was then edited and uploaded on the site to sustain the interest couple of weeks after the movie was released.

“It’s a win win and we get exclusive content which means if you are Adam Driver fan we are the only place that you can come to. So the most important thing is getting exclusives, because exclusives are what drives audience”, she explained.

Going back to the old school approach, the newspaper was able to integrate the legacy of the brand and produce some engaging advertorials, because in the media business everything is about the engagement and keeping the audience on the page as long as possible. You may watch the full lecture of Denise Parkinson here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

We all know at least one nerdy guy, who never leaves his parents place and is always playing video games with his friends online. Well guess what? He now has the chance to build his own Cinderella story and become a real rockstar without the need to give up on his hobby. In fact, he can even make a professional career out of it and compete for millions dollar prize at tournaments all over the world. This is not a story taken from a Hollywood movie that is trying to make the nerds worldwide feel better about themselves. It is the reality of Esports - a trend that is driving the entertainment trends for hundreds of millions millennials around the globe. At this year’s Webit.Festival Europe our guests had the chance to hear the CEO of MTGx Digital Ventures Arnd Benninghoff explaining the world of competitive Gaming and the amazing opportunities it creates for the entertainment market. During his presentation he shared his views about the future of this new industry and compared it to the performance of other traditional sports during the last several years. As an example of the impact of Esports today he showed the audience a YouTube video of the gamer “jackspeticeye” playing Rocketball - a game that is soon going to become a part of the official tournaments. He is playing games, commenting on this and gathering millions of views. The player now has over 15 million subscribers, while the video itself is viewed more than 4.2 million times. And this is not at all a single case. In fact digital influencers all around the world gather millions of followers with new video format. Now they don’t need production companies, because they are able to produce videos from their living rooms. Recent polls show that millennial stars come from the digital universe. In fact if you look at the top 10 influencers for the Generation Y you will find only two people from showbusiness. All the others are online stars, like the biggest youtuber PewDiePie, who now has over 55 million subscribers.

“More than 40% of the millennials in the US between 18 and 24 years of age are leaving the traditional TV and they are not coming back. What defines their life and their pop culture is games. Games are relevant storytelling. They spend an average of 107 minutes per day playing video games compared to 139 minutes watching live TV”, Benninghoff said.

The new sport for this generation is called Esports. This is competitive Gaming that is able to fill big stadiums and now gives gamers the opportunity to play for millions prize money. The statistics of the streaming platforms can easily show us that it is getting even bigger than the traditional sports. Online Gaming means that you start your journey by downloading a game. You start playing the game, then you become a hero and spend hours playing the game. And guess what you do? You want to share your videos on Twitch. You are going to broadcast yourself. Then if you are really good, you will start playing in a team and become a pro gamer, which will be a new career for millions of youngsters. For the broadcasters Gaming is so interesting because it is often free to play. This means that you can just download the game you like and begin a story that can took hundreds of hours of playing time to complete. And now more than 30% of the daily mobile usage is Gaming. The average millennial is spending at least 1 hour per day into this. Benninghoff predicted that soon Esports are going to be added in the Olympic sports calendar. It only depends on the age of the International Olympic Committee members and when will they accept that this is already bigger than most of the other sports. According to ESPN analysts for the first time in generations we are witnessing the birth of a new sport. Gaming is what every traditional sports league is desperate to become - young, global, digital and increasingly diverse. [caption id="attachment_5014" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The CEO of MTGx Digital Ventures Arnd Benninghoff.[/caption] There are now more than 2.2 billion gamers, while if you look at traditional sport there are about 2 billion sport fans. We have more than 20 relevant Esports games and over 200 professional Esports teams. These players do nothing but playing games. They live with their teammates in gaming houses, travel the world and competing for millions of prize money. And there are more than 324 million fans watching them on online platforms and already on TV. Esports opens doors to millennials that are usually hard to reach via traditional media. They have credit cards next to them and you can easily convert them into buyers. That is the reason why the big brands now enter Esports. Corporations like Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Intel, Mastercard and Geico are investing in their own teams. Even traditional football clubs like Wolfsburg, PSG and Schalke 04 are planning Esports teams.

“Over the last few years the distribution platforms are driving the growth and even Facebook is entering live streaming for Esports. The TV stations are also experimenting with Esports content to bring back the millennials. And the next level will be VR where you can join the game, stand in the middle of the things happening and follow the action”, the expert said.

Compared to the $100 billion games market Esports is still a niche market. But by 2020 it is expected to grow by 40% compared to the data for 2015. Asia is now waking up and China is going to be one of the biggest markets over the next year. This year the biggest Esports event happened in the Polish city Katowice and gathered more than 160 000 attendees and over 50 million viewers online. And if you still are not a believer of the Esports Cinderella story, just watch the trailer of the tournament and feel its atmosphere. You may watch Arnd Benninghoff’s full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

Over the past few decades the art of marketing has developed in an increasingly globalized world - a trend, that was only accelerated by the emergence of internet and digital technology. During that period of time we had almost a global liberal consensus, both politically and socially, about the path our world must take. But right now it looks like this world order is on its way to an inevitable collapse and this is something that leads to a massive change the way the companies are approaching consumers. A lot of the brands that we know today took over in the last 25 years and were built on the basis of a global and unified world. In the reality now this is no longer true, because we realized that this concept can’t hold. There are people and constituencies around the world who had been left behind by globalization, who haven’t received benefits as much as other groups. And as a result of that we have the rise of populism. It has given us Trump in the USA, it has given us Brexit in the UK and perhaps even more horribly the phenomenon of grabbing power in Turkey. During the recent Webit.Festival Europe we had the chance to hear these trends explained by the Chief Creative Officer of DigitasLBi Chris Clarke. During his presentation he talked about the death of empathy in the information age and shared his vision on the changes that needs to be made in order to protect our society from the dark and unintended consequences of the idea of free information.

“We are experiencing great social changes and they are completely changing the way brands need to communicate. Only 17 years ago the most powerful computer in the world was called the Big Red and was about the size of a room. Six years later the same processing power was available in the Sony PlayStation 3 and now it is available in the smartphones in our pockets”, he said.

According to Clarke now it is almost impossible for any person or organization to really know what is happening in the world. The pace of change is very fast that it is almost impossible for governments and legislation to keep up. We have a growth of massive digital businesses that have disrupted whole industries and this comes with a big prize that someone has to pay. When The Cluetrain Manifesto, often regarded as the Bible for digital disruption, was released in 2009 we all took for granted the notion that information wants to be free and the idea of free content online. Now we can see that while the industrial disruption can create great opportunities, the problem is that the disrupted industries have not really been replaced in terms of jobs. We have the challenge that economists describe as “premature deindustrialization”. A developing country, like India for example, is trying hard to get the people out of the fields and put them into factories. But now the factories are operated by machines and apps, so they have to get people out of the fields and put them into educational institutions to teach them about software development, which is much bigger leap. That caused huge challenges and countries are struggling to keep up. [caption id="attachment_5006" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Chief Creative Officer of DigitasLBi Chris Clarke[/caption] Back in 2012 when Instagram was bought by Facebook for a $1 billion was the year when Kodak went bust. In its peak Kodak employed 300 000 people around the world and it made revenues of $3-4 billion a year. When Instagram was bought for a billion Instagram had 30 employees and made revenues of $0. So there are some major challenges in terms of value destruction, as well as value creation when it comes to digital disruption. As someone who describes himself as a cheerful dystopian, he warned that marketers must think about the impact of their works when advising brands about the brightest ways to operate in this space. Because the development of internet did not give control to the consumers - it took it away from them. Today we are checking our phones regularly even when we should be playing with our children. The reason for this is the addiction we develop, because of the dopamine reward that the usage of different platforms is giving us.Clarke describes the social media and global businesses like Google and Facebook as the best system of population control ever invented.

“People like to talk about the Arab spring as being a wonderful moment of social media giving start to great rebellion. But it didn’t exactly end up well, did it? Because even as Facebook is quite good for helping us organize ourselves, it’s pretty rubbish when we have to come up with alternative to a theocratic state, like Iran for example. People there are not thinking deeply about their issues, they are liking, passing on information, getting that quick dopamine reward and then moving on”, he said.

The fact that most of the platforms we consume information from are tailored for us creates filter bubbles that took away from us the idea of what people, who are not like us, are reading or experiencing. This is why for many people it was surprise that Brexit and Trump happened - because these major world shaking events are forming inside someone else’s bubble. It is therefore impossible for a brand to address everybody with one campaign idea globally. Because each filter bubble is unique. Couple of years ago Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt predicted that it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that is not in some sense been tailored for them. But despite this negative trends, Clarke is sure that the massive polarization of audiences gives the big brands a chance to stand up and be the driver behind the positive change in the world. The reason is that it is really difficult to mean something to anybody when you are occupying the middle space that is now disappearing. Right after Donald Trump introduced his Muslim ban in the USA, many brands stood up against this, risking to alienate part of their audiences and saying that money are less important than values. This is something that we did not often see in the past and can be an opportunity to have a real impact in the society.

“I genuinely think that there is a fantastic opportunity if we think in the right way of how the internet is configured, if we question it, if we don’t just pretend that the customer is in control, if we don’t just pretend it is all about democracy and laugh. If we recognize some of the darker sides of what we are building we can change it and make it better. And I think that brands have a fantastic role to play in that”, Chris Clarke said.

You may watch his full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

When we talk about digital transformation we often think about the tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, which are spreading their online services to billions of people around the world. And while they may be the driver behind this huge process that is changing our daily lives, but the world economy is still hugely dependent on the results of the real world - the one that produces the goods and raw materials that we all need. During this year’s Webit.Festival Europe the Partner for Europe and Innovation at VCI Roby Stancel spoke about the digital transformation processes in the primary sector, agriculture and mining industries. Mr. Stancel brings two decades of uniquely broad experience in innovation, and helped create hundreds of products, services, strategies, roadmaps and cultural transformations for clients such as Apple, BMW, Nestle, P&G, or Siemens. He manages the strategy for the world’s largest technology innovation consortium in mining with 150 partner companies. He created technology roadmaps for mining houses totaling a market cap of $300 bn. The expert told Webit’s guests that one of the main rules during the development of the so called “design thinking” in Stanford 20 years ago was specifically looking at extreme users and customers because the difference between them and the average consumers is the best inspiration for innovation. That is the reason he tries to look at the digital transformation in the rest of the world, outside of the developed European and North American countries.

“But if I talk about the real world, let’s be clear about one thing. Software doesn’t do the work, real things and real people do. So unless your software is somehow connected to the real world you might have a very difficult time to convince people to do something about it”, he said.

According to him, even if a company is number one in its industry, it can’t keep being successful only by advertising without creating real value because digitalization is going to wipe out many service industries in the next several years. He thinks that the current tech giant Facebook will disappear if it don’t manage to buy all the companies like WhatsApp that could be dangerous to them, because everyone hates Facebook. The users hate it because they have to view the world not through their eyes, but through a camera lens, helping them to post cool pictures in their feeds. The readers hate it because they sit on their desks and watch how everybody else is having a great time, which of course is an illusion. Companies hate it because they have to be there, so emotionally Facebook owns the world, but it is very loaded with negative value. And it is probably going to be replaced by a new company that offers similar reach but a better experience. Stancel is sure that the trust problems that many of the services we use today have will ultimately lead to their extinction.

“This is a main point. Innovation happens at the speed of trust, not at the speed of technology. You can dream up the most amazing things if you are able to put together all technology that we have today, but people will need to trust it”, the expert explained.

As an example he pointed out the coming of the email - an event that was supposed to create the paperless office. But in the first years after its adoption, the emails led to an explosion in the amounts of paper used in offices around the world. Only now, a generation later, we actually have paperless offices, as the digital natives come into the workforce. So it is about the trust that people put into something, not in the technology. Another similar case is Tesla’s autopilot - a service that many people do not consider safe enough. According to Stancel the autonomous driving technology was available in the beginning of the century but just now the automakers think it is appropriate to start rolling it out into the mass production vehicles, because the society may be ready for that kind of change. [caption id="attachment_5000" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Partner for Europe and Innovation at VCI Roby Stancel.[/caption] Digitalization will revolutionize many real world industries so it won’t put them out of place. The automotive industry will still build cool cars and people will still want to drive their own vehicles because it means that they have freedom of movement. But for example many big companies like VW are focusing on different aspects that can give them an added value. The German concern recently announced that it wants to be the best at weather forecasting. That means that every windshield wiper sensor and every traction control sensor in VW cars will tell the company exactly how the weather is in every place on the Earth. So the revolution in these German cars will be the ability to react to rapidly changing weather conditions. The agriculture industry is also going through this. With a flying drone with infrared camera you can tell where there is enough water on the field and where there is not enough. And so therefore you can irrigate very focused and save a lot of resources. You can have for example the spray of chemicals can be greatly reduced because of this. You can also use weeding robots with optical recognition. They see the plants that we want and the weeds and pulls them up.

“As a matter of fact you can have infrared lasers that kills bugs and imagine if you could replace chemicals and GMO crops with digital technology. And it is happening so I’m with fingers crossed”, he said.

You may watch his full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

After so much talking about the changes coming with the development of digital technologies almost all of us now realize that we live in the time of the Fourth industrial revolution. Much has been said about the top tech innovations that are going to change the way we live, but the topic of the responsibility of corporations that are the driving force of those changes somehow remains aside from most of the discussions. During this year’s Webit.Festival Europe the question was raised by the CEO of BulPros Ivaylo Slavov - a highly qualified entrepreneur and corporate executive, specialized both in developing startup and established organization. He has been working in different managerial roles at Microsoft, Adecco, SEB, Unisys, Comparex (PC Ware) across EMEA. BULPROS is an international IT Solutions, Products & Services Corporation, specialized in Cloud, Security, IoT, Big Data and Analytics, Collaboration and Digital Transformation. The company is focused on Technology and Telecommunications, Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare. The company is one of the fastest growing technology enterprises in Central Europe according to Deloitte’s latest report “Technology Fast 50 in Central Europe” and “Technology Fast 500 in Europe, Middle East, and Africa”. Slavov pointed out several examples of former market giants, such as Borders bookstores, Kodak and Blockbuster LLC that didn’t manage to go through the process of digital transformation on time and were forced to file for bankruptcy.

“All these examples show us that we can’t stop the disruption. Today we are in a phase where the disruption can’t be stopped. We are in the phase of the Fourth industrial revolution. And my question to all of you here is what we do about the global governance”, he asked.

The executive is certain that in the time we live in corporations have the opportunity and responsibility to create a world with equitable participation of all people in formal and societal governance in accordance with principles of justice and individual rights, free from discrimination and identity-based prejudices. He thinks that the power of private initiative will enable the big tech companies to meet the needs of an exponentially changing world. According to him, measuring the exact impact of the upcoming changes to our life is crucial for every player on the market. The reason is that the exponential changes that we are going to experience in the next decades will affect not only entertainment and software development and infrastructure, but also our jobs, the way we use transport, communicate and understand the world around us.

“We have more than 7 billion people around the world which are living under different social conditions. We have many individuals that will potentially be affected by automation. We have many situations which could be changed dramatically in terms of losing jobs and understanding how those things will develop”, he said.

[caption id="attachment_4997" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The CEO of BULPROS Ivaylo Slavov[/caption] Slavov believes that all these questions must be raised by corporate leaders and policy makers around the world along with the discussions about the digital transformation. From his experience of local and international seminars, even the big brand executives still are not able to make long-term predictions about the landscape in their markets and the future of their teams and companies after 10 or 15 years. He pointed out the differences between the Dot-com revolution he was a part of 19 years ago and said that the biggest problem then was the lack of connectivity and global access to technology. In contrary, the then developed technologies, like the cloud computing, now enable corpоrations to implement their innovations at a larger scale than ever before. In the same time, thousands of startups and companies are disrupting each and every process in each and every industry using these resources. The executive thinks that world’s leading companies must start asking themselves what role they have to take in the global governance from social, practical and educational side, so that the 7.2 billion people on the planet are treated well and have equal chance for development. You may watch his full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

In the next few decades we are going to witness an exponential change in the world of technology that is going to dramatically change every aspect of the way we live. But while many people are very concerned about the new technological trends coming, very few have noted one factor that they bring to the marketplace. According to the Founder and Executive Director of Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN) Robert C. Wolcott each one of these trends push sensing, analytics and access to shared resources in more and more places in the economy and closer to us. That means that they push the production and provision of products and services ever closer to the moment at which they might be demanded. The Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship was among the 300 top level speakers at this years Webit.Festival Europe. During his on stage presentation he shared some of his views about how technology will transform every industry in the 21st century. In his work in KIN he looks for two things - strategy and implications of technology and change for large corporation. Wolcott is working hard to figure out where the world might be going and how to get there, while as an angel investor he is thinking about the future with respect to startups and emerging companies. He pointed out Amazon as an example of company with vision about its future connection with the customers. For the past two years the retail giant is trying out something called anticipatory shipping. This means that they are watching your online behavior and send products to the distribution centers near you before you have even ordered the product. [caption id="attachment_4993" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Founder and Executive Director of Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN)[/caption] Wolcott is sure that with the development of 3D printing will bring a real long-term revolution in the global supply chain of manufacturing. Things will start from the peripheries, because the biggest threats and opportunities never come in the middle of a market. The big players in different fields already know everything about their markets, but the disruptions often comes in small ways and emerge over time.

“For instance today 20% of plastic auto replacement parts cost more to ship than they do to manufacture. Do you think at some point in the next decade people will start to produce auto plastic replacement parts through 3D printing closer and closer to the moment at which it is demanded in time and space”, he asked.

The expert noted that last year there were 250 000 taxi and limo drivers in the US. But some time in the next 20 years all these jobs will be completely eliminated. This is a big concern both for governments and corporations, because we need an opportunity for everyone to evolve to transition to this new world. Today we have a global supply chain optimized for scale manufacturing at a distance. This means that the larger the manufacturing facility is, the lower the cost. In the next 30 or 40 years this equation will completely change and this will transform our economy fundamentally. During an interview with Mr. Wolcott at the Frankfurt auto show last year, the CEO of Peugeot-Citroen Carlos Tavarez said that just 5 years ago no one seriously paid attention to the idea of self-driving cars. Today every major player in the industry is trying to figure out how to catch up with disruptors like Tesla. He predicted that if the trend continues with this speed after 20 years we will not argue whether we should let autonomous cars on the road, but if we should let human drivers. And we can easily tell who is going to be the winner of this argument. [caption id="attachment_4991" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Founder and Executive Director of Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN) presenting one of our Webit Awards.[/caption] The technology is going to change even the metrics we use to measure the impact on the market. The normal family today usually needs at least two cars, but it may only need one vehicle in the future. For the entire history of the global automotive industry we have used unit sales as the one metric to show how successful a company is. All of the capital allocation, inventory management, marketing decisions and sales channels are focused around this metric. According to the professor if we don’t recognize that soon it will not work in the same way as today, the tyranny of metrics will bring us down. Because we will continue to make decision based on performance metric that used to work and at some point of the future won’t work anymore. The solution is creating a portfolio of metrics to measure how things are going so that companies know how they are doing in advance of things changing.

“There is a light at the end of the tunnel. If our vehicles in the future are driving around a lot more we will have what is called higher asset utilization. Which means we will need more replacement parts and services. And guess what automakers make a lot more money on then selling a car - replacement parts and service”, he said.

Wolcott thinks that enterprises should start asking themselves what are the client needs they can prototype today that gets them in the game for the future. They should also try to identify technologies and business models that are happening on the periphery and might add tons of value, because the peripheral vision might turn out to be the biggest source of competitive advantage. He predicts that over the next 20 to 40 years across all industries everything will be shifting to push the production and provision of products and services ever closer to the moment at which they are demanded. So the questions we should be asking ourselves are what value are we providing, can we produce and provide our products and services at the moment they are demanded and if not will we still be relevant in the next 20 years. You may watch his full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

Our near future presents before us amazing opportunities, driven by advancements in technologies for virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence and automation, scanning people’s minds and many more. But those incredible things are not going to become reality without an ever increasing number of computers, further development of cloud technologies and operation systems that are going to drive all these processes. During this year’s Webit.Festival Europe our guests heard about some of the technologies that are going to change our everyday lives. But they also had the chance to listen to the Vice-President and CTO of VMware for EMEA region Joe Baguley explaining how the invisible intelligent infrastructure his company and its competitors are providing will enable us to build the future we want. VMware is a member of the Dell Technology family of businesses. It is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology. The company helps accelerating the digital transformation of its clients by enabling unprecedented freedom and flexibility in how they build and evolve IT environments. While their work may remain unseen by the end customer the organizations working in this field are crucial for improving business agility by modernizing data centers and integrating public clouds, driving innovation with modern apps and safeguarding customer trust by transforming security. During his keynote speech at Webit.Festival Joe Baguley said that many clients come to VMware talking about their digital transformation strategy and the things they want to do with their data centers and infrastructure.

“My simple answer to them is that no digital transformation has ever started in the data center. No digital transformation ever started with a computer scientist. Digital transformation starts with the user and if there is one thing that enterprises need to learn and understand in the modern age is that they have never ever thought about their users, they have only ever thought about the business”, he added.

The expert thinks that the key to successful digital transformation is understanding and focusing on who you actually sell to and why is he buying your product. In the world of B2B relationships the main goal behind buying an enterprise product is to solve your customers problems, so if you are a company like VMware you better think about the best ways to help your customers sell more to their customers. [caption id="attachment_4985" align="aligncenter" width="640"] VMware’s Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for EMEA Joe Baguley.[/caption] The digital transformation we see today is driven by 3 main factors - business agility and innovation, exceptional mobile experiences and protection of brand and customer trust. The priorities are to modernize data centers, integrate public clouds, empower digital workspaces and transform security. Almost all projects that we can see in IT organizations today fell into one of these priorities. And all these priorities are going through a cycle. You analyze that there is a problem. Then you decide that the way to solve it is an app. Over time that app generates data about its users and their habits. You hopefully analyze that data to take advantage of it and update the application. That generates more data and the cycle goes again, while you are getting better and better app. Usually this process takes about 12 to 18 months for most of the companies. But if they want to be like the leaders in the digital economy Google, Amazon, etc., they need to do this multiple times a day.

“Most leading edge companies push different code to their production systems multiple times a day, minute or hour and not once in every 3 to 5 years. The reason you are behind is that you are not going around this loop quick enough. You do it faster, you win. Whether that is with your startup or your massive enterprise organization”, Baguley said.

According to him, there are three things that stops companies from going around this loop - people, processes and technology. The aim of VMware is to help them with the last two of the factors with the development of invisible intelligent infrastructure that spreads data, entire applications and storage across multiple machines and multiple physical locations. The expert is sure that the rise of AI will bring a real revolution in the world of data management. The reason is that one of the large customers of his company operates over 350 000 virtual machines in a single cloud. If each one of them is creating 10 events per second that is 3.5 million events that need to be processed in that cloud. No human being in the world can understand and respond to 3.5 million machines to give you the idea of the health of that application and that infrastructure. The only way to make the machines this big to support the amazing stuff we hear about all day is to make the computer think about itself.

“Look around and think how can you help your organization and customers to get around this cycle quicker. Think about what is in the way between you and doing this and what can you do to get stuff out of the way. We are making sure technology is not in the way. We are making sure technology is so intelligent that is invisible intelligent infrastructure. It’s just there, it works, it thinks about itself”, Baguley said.

You may watch his full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

In an age of exponential advances in technologies, that soon seemed destined to remain part of the sci-fi movies, people around the world are having a hard time catching up with all the breakthroughs emerging from the IT industry. As with everything new we face, there is fundamental issue of trust between customers and the tech innovators, trying to build a new digital world for all of us. There are numerous questions that the IT experts need to answer, before the public starts perceiving trends like the rise of AI and automation as something positive for the future. Right now, most of us see the global tech giants collecting billions of data units from their users and doing whatever they want with them. But companies like Amazon and Facebook are now promoting customer obsession as the right way of doing business in the digital age and are leading the pack towards a more secure and trustworthy user interaction. Among those responsible companies is Skyscanner - one of the largest online search engines for comparing prices of flights, hotels and cars for hire from all over the world. Its Founder and CEO Gareth Williams was among over 300 top level speakers at this year’s Webit.Festival Europe and explained to the guests of the event what are the best ways to start a digital business and to earn the trust of your customers. He thinks that although the users still are not very interested in the ways big companies use their personal data, history will look back and judge them for the decisions they make today.

“It seems to me that there is a fundamental issue of trust and we have been packaged up as units of data. Right now, Wall Street brings global economic crashes. It is seen in a bad light by huge parts of the population and I’m wandering if we are heading in the same direction”, the entrepreneur said.

Williams warned that now it is still legal to unite people as packages of data and do what you want with them, but noted that he is proud that when Skyscanner set up its goals, the leading aim was to become the most trusted and most used online travel brand in the world. Nearly 15 years after its launch, Skyscanner connects more than 60 million people every month directly to everything the travel industry has to offer. The company is also powering travel search for over 1200 partners through its Skyscanner for Business products. Talking about the impact of aviation, Williams quoted the English pioneer in this field Claude Grahame-White, who in 1914 predicted that the globe will be linked by flight and nations will become so knit together that they will grow to be next-door neighbours - something we can easily notice in Europe since the end of the World War II. “What railways have done for nations, airways will do for the world”, Claude Grahame-White said. [caption id="attachment_4979" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Founder and CEO of Skyscanner Gareth Williams.[/caption] According to Williams, the rise of information technology in the recent decades, combined with the constant growth in aviation demand created amazing business opportunities that people like him managed to use. Recent survey by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) showed that aviation could be worth $88 billion to the world economy in 20 years. Part of the reason for that is the new regulation on private jets that Chinese authorities adopted last year. Gareth Williams said that while entrepreneurship may be defined as the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled, the best definition for good management is quite the opposite - the pursuit of opportunity with complete regard to resources currently controlled. He thinks that the key to building a successful company is the right combination between these two driving forces - spirit for entrepreneurship and managerial realism.

“Pretty much that is illustrated by the Skyscanner’s modest past from our early days starting with very basic website and zero funding for the first 5 years. And we kept on trying to get the balance right between that entrepreneurship and that management of the chaos. And we kept on doing it as we went along and so that each year we are modestly increasing the number of people who chose to come back to us”, the CEO said.

Williams quoted the famous former CEO of Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher, who once said that if the Wright brothers were alive today, Wilbur would have to fire Orville to reduce costs. While this may seem a little too harsh, the right cost management is among the key factors for the aviation industry - something that was showed 30 years ago by American Airlines. In 1987 the company managed to save $40 000 by eliminating one olive from each passenger’s salad plate. The expert suggested that the most important factor for making a successful digital business may be how frequently the user need your product or service. The Co-founder of Google and CEO of Alphabet Larry Page calls the process of determining this “The Toothbrush Test”. Before launching a product or service for the mass public, he ask himself if the average person would use it at least twice a day. Williams’s recipe for success in the digital world includes building a team with more product designers and engineers, rather than investing in the great profit extraction engines of the world like Google, Facebook etc. Then you need to go to something that is frequent enough to get the word of mouth and advertise itself. You may watch his full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

The major advances in digital and mobile technology in the recent years caused a real revolution in the finance and payments industry and are giving us a glimpse of a world without cash. And while development like this still seem too far away, we can still see big changes, both in terms of corporate strategies and consumers habits. This year the guests at Webit.Festival Europe had the chance to listen to Mastercard’s Digital Payments Product Leader for Central and Eastern Europe Brian Morris sharing his views on the future of payments in the region and worldwide. The scope of his work covers the development and implementation of new digital initiatives, the formation of partnerships with local industry players, digital platform management and expansion as well as the development of an Innovation strategy. The expert explained that right now Mastercard has over 2.3 billion cards in circulation. The main goal of the company is to make them all digital, because almost all connected devices we have today can also work as payment devices. As a major trend in the world of payments, Morris pointed out the increased enthusiasm for the use of biometrics, like fingerprints, iris scans and facial recognition technology.

“These are all technology implementations and tech innovations. How the consumer feel is very important because all of you should understand that unless you start from the consumer and work back the way you will just have a nice technology that doesn’t do anything for people”, he said.

Mastercard polls show that people around the world have positive feelings about innovation and the ability to use their payment cards on lots of different devices. 92% of consumers think that innovation has a positive impact on society. Around 50% of consumers are eager promoters or enthusiastic followers of digital payments. Brian Morris admitted that historically the banking and financial industry has not always looked straight at what the customer needs, but now this is becoming a much more important focus. The polls show also that the consumers prefered device for payments is now the mobile phone, while the digital customers prefer using their fingerprint more than a PIN code. Just a few years ago people didn’t want to use biometrics, because fingerprint scans were associated with criminals, police records and series of other negative factors. But now the advance of smartphones made people comfortable with using fingerprints to authenticate themselves and gives them a much better user experience. [caption id="attachment_4973" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Mastercard's Digital Payments Product Lead for Central and Eastern Europe Brian Morris.[/caption] According to Morris, the top 4 priorities for Mastercard in developing their new products and services are: the security of the bank account, the security of personal data, the speed of the process and the simplicity of the product or service itself. If we want to put our cards into a lot of different devices we must know that our personal and banking information is secure. One thing Mastercard is doing is working on industry standards like tokenization. This means that the company is taking our data and encrypting it, so that it can be used only on the device it is stored on. The speed is also a very important factor, because we currently live in society with no patience. If something does not happen very quick and easy, we don’t want to use it again. Simplicity in payments gives a huge added value for the customer, because this is something that we do every day. It must be simple, intuitive and easy to follow. Morris noted that we are moving fast from a card-based society to contactless cards and that Bulgaria is among the leading markets for this in the region. But even the contactless technology is not the thing we all want. That is why Mastercard is building its fully digital environment for omni-channel reach.

“You are able to use your digitized card on your mobile phone, your connected fridge, on your fitness device, all fully protected and secured. And the key to that is how to make this happen on all these devices in a way which make sense. With innovation it is very easy to find lots of companies doing lots and lots of very exciting and very interesting things, but the key to making it truly successful is these three elements - security, convenience and scale”, he said.

The scale means it can be adopted in many many markets across many different platforms and it is easily adapted. We see a lot of emerging innovations that does not have the scale capabilities. Central and Eastern Europe is a major innovation region for payments and according to Mastercard polls it is among the top regions in the world in terms of enthusiasm and adoption of innovation. People here want to see more digitalization in transport, health and education, but to enable all this we must first solve our payments problems. Morris thinks that the key to this is focusing on the entire ecosystem, including the big technology companies, FinTech innovators and startups and government institutions. That is why Mastercard is deploying its StartPath problems for emerging companies and is contributing to Smart Transport systems around the world using the contactless card as a main driver for adopting new payment technologies. You may watch his full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]