Along with Webit.Festival Europe's official agenda and conferences on topics like Marketing and Innovation, Digital Transformation, BigData, IoE, Mobility, Health and many more, we should also mention the social events of the festival and more specifically - The Sofia Night Urban Summit. During the nights of 24th-26th of April, the top restaurants, bars and places to have a drink across Sofia's center will host the 33 meetups on topics including The art of Advertising, Mobile Geeks, Music & Tech, Artificial Intelligence, eSports, Neuroscience and Life, Are we alone in Universe? and Hacking the Body. The meetups are networking events for people to gather, share and explore each other's interest in a particular topic. Everyone could join the free discussion, drinks with friends and colleagues. Bring your people to the meetups you like the most, take pictures and share them with #webit, so we can collect your smiles!

But most importantly, you can see all the meetups HERE and apply to be host of one of them. You don't need to prepare speeches, we just need you to be interested in the topic and to be ready to ask questions to keep the discussion interesting. The application takes no more than a few minutes. If you are approved you will receive confirmation from our team through email. All the places, hosting the meetups, will be announced shortly.

Quantum computing offers the possibility of technology that is millions of times more powerful than the systems we currently have. It long seemed like one of those technologies, that are 20 years away, but 2017 could be the year that the field sheds its research-only image. But according to Forbes the key to success will be translating the real world problems into quantum language. The first company that offers the technology for doing that for commercial use is called D-Wave.

“Complex processes are all around us. By using quantum computing to operate them more effectively, we can make just about everything we do run more smoothly”, said Jeremy Hilton, Senior Vice President, Systems, at the company.

Computing giants like Google and Microsoft recently have set challenging goals or the year with the ambition to more from pure science towards engineering. In 2014 Google started working on a form of quantum computing that harnesses superconductivity. This year the tech giant hopes to perform a computation that is beyond the capabilities of the most powerful supercomputers. Meanwhile, Microsoft is betting on the unproven concept of tоpological quantum computing based on the theoretical work on topological states of matter that won three physicists the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016. Today IBM announced that it is taking its first steps toward commercialising quantum computing. The company has updated its Quantum Experience cloud with a new API that it hopes will increase the abilities of researchers and other parties to build more sophisticated applications. Last year IBM opened up its NY state labs to the public, hoping that this will help advance in the technology, which remains in the preliminary stage of development. The new API will help programmers who want to write scripts in their programming language of choice to deliver batches of experiments rather than using the simple interactive language that IBM released last May. This will enable users to build connections between IBM’s cloud-based quantum computer and more “classic” computers without needing background in quantum physics to do it. To learn more about the future of computing, software development and DevOps, join the Dev Summit within Webit.Festival. On the scene you’ll see and hear top level speakers, such as the Founder and CTO of Maria DB Foundation and Founder of MySL AB Michael “Monty” Widenius, the Founder and CTO of Hired Allan Grant, and the Developer Evangelist in Amazon Peter Heinrich.

The next massive digital transformation of the world economy will be led by a perfect storm of several different, but equally important trends in the software industry. Open source development, machine learning and artificial intelligence, changing infrastructure and customer-first design all have the power to be game-changers and to transform the world we live in. This combination will create new opportunities for startup creation and industry disruption. The process will put additional pressure on the already established enterprises to abolish the older technology and reinvent themselves. One of the common things between the main industry disruptors nowadays is the use of open code software and still managing to monetize their ideas. The other is that they all perceive their businesses as software based. Webit has always been all about the future of enterprise and policy-making. That is why on this edition of Webit.Festival we have invited top experts in the software development industry. During the Dev Summit will share their experience on topics, such as what is DevOps, how can you streamline and automate Ops, Agile & DevOps, Boosting developers productivity with DevOps and managing deployments and infrastructure with DevOps. The Founder and CTO of MariaDB Foundation and Founder of MySQL AB Michael “Monty” Widenius will explain to the audience how to make money from open source software. Google’s Developer Advocate Don Dodge will talk about the current state of Machine Learning at one of the biggest corporations in the world, where it is already been used in products people use every day. The Developer Evangelist at Amazon Peter Heinrich will speak about the millions of downloads and in-app purchases Amazon processes every year and what are the three monetization secrets of the top mobile apps. Hired’s Founder and CTO Allan Grant will share his thoughts about the secrets of starting a marketplace company, its building and maintaining. He will give the audience advices on the user targeting and methods for creating a sustainable community. The Founder and Chairman of Pocket App Paul Swaddle will speak about the expected growth in enterprise mobile app development, as business focus on “mobilising” their workforce to improve productivity, business efficiency and customer service. Meanwhile, the CTO of TapOnIt Tsahi Liberman will explain what are the emerging business models of children games and how to teach our kids about peace and tolerance using them. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

As we approach Webit.Festival our team is starting series Q&A with our speakers. We are presenting you the first sessions with Alexander Renz, who will speak during the Mobility track of our Smart Cities Summit. As Managing Partner at New Mobility Consulting, Alex Renz helps corporations, startups and investors take advantage of the opportunities emerging from the digital transformation of transportation and mobility, or New Mobility for short. He explores the transformative impact of connected vehicles, autonomous driving, electric mobility and on demand mobility services and fosters cross-industry collaboration across the emerging New Mobility ecosystem. How will big automotive corporations cope with the changing world of mobility? The Automotive industry is facing challenges on multiple fronts. The shift towards electric mobility will make decades of engineering know how in building combustion engines obsolete. It will also require a lot less workers to build electric vehicles, both at the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and at their supplier networks. The other big changes are connectivity and the vehicle as part of our digital lifestyles. Consumer experiences and data-driven business models will become more and more important, both things that the incumbents are not very good at. But the biggest changes will emerge from driverless vehicles. We believe that driverless cars will have the most profound impact, not only on the car industry itself, but smart cities and real estate, public transport and insurance carrier to name a few. When will we see the full-scale influx of self-driving vehicles? The industry is making fast progress towards Level 3 and Level 4 Autonomous Driving, but it will probably take longer than most people expect before we have full Level 4 (NHTSA) automation where no driver is required at any time and the system can handle all driving situations autonomously. However, with Level 3 we will see vehicles that can drive in a fully automated fashion without the need for a driver in defined use case scenarios. The most likely initial scenarios will be around trucks on highways. For the foreseeable future a driver will steer the truck as soon as it gets off the highway. The other big initial wave will likely be ride hailing, driven by players such as UBER and Lyft as well as the OEMs themselves, who transform into Mobility Services providers. Even though several OEMs have announced fully autonomous production vehicles for ride hailing by 2021 it remains to be seen if that will happen. Especially in cities there are a myriad of driving situations that will challenge the capabilities of robot cars. As much as I am optimistic that these challenges can be addressed, there are regulatory hurdles that need to be overcome. How can the industry monetize the wealth of data generated by connected and autonomous vehicles of the future? Vehicles today are already loaded with sensors that generate massive amounts of data. However, until now the use of these sensors was focused on optimizing the internal functions of the car. Autonomous, connected vehicles will gather a lot of information about the vehicle itself, but also the driver and the environment. The debate as to who owns this data is still ongoing. There are huge data privacy implications and especially the German OEMs are very sensitive to protecting their customer’s privacy. The big challenge for the industry is to develop relevant services that create brand loyalty and consumer engagement. Building relevant, contextual services is difficult, but even harder will be to build services that enough customers are willing to pay for to really matter for OEMs. The Internet services players will have a big advantage here, since their existing services easily translate into the driverless vehicle. I believe that OEMs have a great opportunity if they can manage to combine engineering with digital competencies. They need to learn to design great user experiences and develop data science expertise to harness the data generated by the vehicle. In my view the car will need to become a platform for an ecosystem of services providers, much like we know it from mobile phones. Unfortunately they have relied heavily on suppliers and have given up to much control over what becomes a key strategic battleground. Today’s connected car platforms are legacy technology and the mindset of OEMs continues to be that of a closed system. But there are interesting startup emerging that empower OEMs to develop new business models and increase agility without compromising on security and compliance. What is the most significant technology that will shape the future of mobility in your mind? If I had to pick a single exponential technology, I would say Artificial Intelligence in view of its importance for both automated driving, and digital assistants. However, ultimately it is not about a single exponential technology, but the convergence of technologies such as smart sensors networks, artificial intelligence and autonomous robotic systems. We envision a world where robots such as cars become their own economic agents and will look for passengers and deliveries to generate revenues. Smart contracts on the blockchain will enforce maintenance and insurance policies, govern fares and pay taxes based on actual for road usage. In such as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy we will have autonomous vehicles transact with charging stations and other network participants without human intervention. We need a next generation Internet to enable such networks to scale securely. We believe the blockchain has a big role to play in this next generation Internet. It provides a trusted, network-based identity, but also as an asset management and transaction layer. In many ways the blockchain will enable IoT, autonomous robotic systems and artificial intelligence to take us into the future of mobility. That is the core of my session at Webit.Festival in Sofia. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

Tech experts around the world list the Internet of Everything (IoE) as one of the top trends in the digital economy. The term brings together people, processes, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before and create new opportunities for businesses, individuals and countries. Expansion of this process is connecting people in more relevant and valuable ways. It helps for converting data into intelligence and making better decisions. IoE delivers the right information to the right person at the right time, while connecting physical devices and objects to the internet. Many new technologies will enable a wider range of IoE services and some of them will also pose interesting challenges for implementation. The upcoming 5G tech is intended to enable network operators to evolve their current business models to support a wider variety of relationships with partners and customers in the IoE. Meanwhile network functions virtualization and cloud technologies have the potential to radically change communications and office environments from physical world to reality where everything is software-based and easy to change. At this year’s Webit.Festival you can listen to some of the top experts in this innovative field of digital industry. During the IoE Summit they will share their thoughts on the development of IoT, Smart Homes, M2M, Wearables, Education Tech and Virtual and Augmented Reality. The CEO of Amyx+ Scott Amyx will show how to successfully execute in IoT and how to turn disruption into innovation. The expert is winner of the Cloud & DevOps World Innovation award and was voted among the top IoT Influencers & Experts by Inc. Magazine. Right after him, the CEO of Elemental Machines Sridhar Iyengar will show us how IoT is helping solve the complex world of science and will explain why smart devices are still not a part of every research laboratory. The Global Editorial Director of Wall Street Journal Custom Studios Fara Warner will speak on the best ways to tell a story in the world of virtual and augmented reality from media’s point of view. Josh Software’s Co-founder Gautam Rege will share his thoughts on the future of smart homes, where everything happens at the touch of a button and how it will affect our quality of life. The CEO of TechHuddle Richard Yeo will talk about the current state of ecommerce and will give his predictions for the future of IoE. Meanwhile, the Vice President of SCA for Digital Transformation Gael De Talhouet will tell the audience about the rise of IoT and subscription models and the automation of purchases. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

Despite the fact that over the last century medicine noted significant achievements that led to the increase in life expectancy of more than 20 years, health care remains one of the most inefficient and unreformed sectors. Today, connectivity and information are the hottest words in the world of health technology. The new trends in this extremely important field are improving communication, but still pose some concerns for safety of personal information. Experts predict that this year we will see a big jump in data integration in healthcare. This can lead to simplified processes, health monitoring with mobile apps and will have an overall positive impact on patient engagement. The current medical data systems were designed before the Big Data revolution and need to change for better connection between the various sources of information. All the upcoming transformations will impact the delivery of care that benefits both the patient and the provider. Patients are increasingly accessing healthcare services from home as national health systems and vendors begin to get on board. By the end of 2017 nearly 90% of all large employers in the USA are expected to offer telehealth benefits, up from 75% in 2016 and only 30% in 2015. This dramatic increase is an opportunity for many employees to utilize innovative telehealth services for their families. At this year’s Webit.Festival you can listen to some of the top experts in those innovative fields of digital industry. During the Health & Wellbeing Summit they will share their thoughts on the development of VR in medicine, using cognitive technologies to address today’s most pressing issues and the emergence of medical wearables. The Consultant surgeon and Co-founder of Virtual Medics and Medical Realities prof. Shafi Ahmed will explain how the rise of virtual reality technologies will help for improving surgical education. Last year the professor performed the world’s first VR operation, which was watched by more than 55 000 people in 140 countries and reached 4.5 million users on Twitter. The Deputy Chief Health Officer at IBM’s Watson Lisa Latts will speak about the problems of today’s healthcare delivery worldwide and how artificial intelligence can help for crucial data analysis. She will also explain how Watson is helping pharmaceutical companies speed up the discovery of targets for drug development. Meanwhile, the Founder and CEO of Biovotion Dr. Andreas Caduff will talk about the next wave of healthtech wearables and the emergence of devices that combine the ease of use and design of the consumer world, the intelligence of sophisticated monitoring with the compliance and regulatory requirements from the medical device area. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

For the last few years we have witnessed an incredible growth in the market for mobile apps, that is expected to generate over 268 billion mobile downloads and an income of $77 billion in 2017. But now many experts predict the coming of post-app era. This does not mean that apps on our smartphones, tablets and PC’s are going to disappear completely, but that we will be interacting with them differently. We are seeing the battle between the two most used platforms for mobile iOS and Android since the creation of the smartphone. And while the apps in Apple’s store make the most money, they account to only 15% of all downloaded apps. The market is changing fast and some apps just lose their attractiveness or becomes a built-in tool in the new phones. That was the case with the flashlight, most camera apps and other things, that your phone already can do. For example, usage of dedicated video apps declined four percentage points between 2015 and 2016, that of standalone maps apps dropped three percentage points while social media app usage reduced by two percentage points. On the other hand, the use of messaging apps increased 3% and shopping apps grew with 4%. According to the CEO of data quality services company PCA Predict Jamie Turner the significant work on newer browser technology that feels as fast as native apps will remove the need for hundreds of them to exist. Gartner expects that by 2020 almost 40% of mobile interactions will be made by smart agents, or virtual private assistants. This means that we can predict major developments of products like Google Now, Cortana, Siri and Alexa. For the last year the use of digital assistants increased by 4%. At this year’s Webit.Festival you can listen to some of the top Digital Transformation experts in the world, like the CEO of JetPack Aviation David Mayman, the Partner for Europe and Innovation at VCI Roby Strancel, the CMO of AngelHack Brian Collins and the Chief Designer at SAP Martin Wezowski. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

Last year made it quite clear that cybersecurity is a serious threat. Major cyber breaches were registered during the American president election campaign and many think that they have played a major part in Donald Trump’s eventual win. Just in couple of months Yahoo revealed that previous attacks from 2014 and 2013 affected more than 1 billion user records. Meanwhile the hosting company OVH became victim of a 1 Tbps DDoS attack that hit its servers. That was the largest offensive of its kind ever seen. But just couple of months after the servers of Dyn, the company that controls much of the internet’s domain name system (DNS) infrastructure. Тhat attack’s strength was about 1.2 Tbps. Now the world expects to see a big improvement in cyber security regulations, while the demand for security skills will continue to rise. The new generation of AI-powered attacks will be crafty enough to emulate the behaviors of users and even to fool the most skilled security personnel. According to International Data Corporation’s research, by 2020 the business is expected to spend $101.6 billion on cybersecurity software, services and hardware. This is a 38% increase than the $73.7 billion spent on cybersecurity in 2016. At this year’s Webit.Festival you can listen to some of the top experts in those innovative fields of digital industry. During the Security & Privacy Summit they will share their thoughts on the ways we can secure our digital future, the economics of web scrapping and data protection in cloud services. The CTO of Intel Security for EMEA region Raj Samani will explain how technology will continue to play an integral part of our future and how can we save the digital world from being held to ransom. Leaders in Security’s CEO Ulrich Seldeslachts will talk about the active role of his organization in the development of security policies and practices in the domain of industrial control systems and cyber security. LSEC is a non for profit industry association, focused on Information Security in Europe. The Managing DIrector of Threatspace Dermont Williams will speak on the topic of shared responsibility model, that applies for the security in Cloud computing platforms. He will share ideas about the required solutions for monitoring the usage of sanctioned cloud applications. Meanwhile in the Digital Economy Leadership Summit experts will discuss the legislative changes that need to be made to ensure cyber security of citizens and institutions. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

We are standing at the start of a giant transformation, that will change every business and aspect of our lives. In the past two years the world has created more data than in the entire previous history of human race. According to EMC study, the data volumes are growing so fast, that by the end of 2020 we will create 1.7 megabytes of new information every second. By then our digital storage will grow from 4.4 zettabytes today to around 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. Right now the Big Data market worldwide stands around $7.6 trillion, which is bigger than the whole fuel industry. This is the reason many experts said that data has finally become the new oil of the world. In the next few years we expect the number of connected devices worldwide to reach more than 34 billion. This news is more than welcome for the business, because all the gathered information will completely change the way enterprises approach their customers. The expanding big data comes with adoption of cloud technology and online delivery of hosted services. This enables companies to consume a computing resources, such as virtual machine or storage, rather than having to build and maintain their own computing infrastructures. In 2016 the spending on public cloud infrastructure reached $38 billion, while Forbes predicts that it will grow to $173 billion in 2026. At this year’s Webit.Festival you can listen to some of the top experts in those innovative fields of digital industry. During the Big Data & Cloud Summit they will share their thoughts on the development of IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Technology and convergence of cognitive and cloud security as a business enabler. The Vice President of Cloud and Mobile Technology Strategy at IBM Jonas Jacobi will talk about the power of the combination between AI and IoT and how it will impact our daily lives - both personal and professional. Meanwhile, the Community Director and Technology Evangelist at TIBCO Kai Waehner will tell the audience about the latest trends in Cloud Native Architectures, Hybrid Integration Platforms and Microservices. He will also talk about Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Real Time Event Processing. IBM’s Chief Information Officer on Cloud & SaaS Operational Services David Cass will explain some of the fundamental digital changes that the world is going through and how the use of Cognitive and Cloud is helping businesses transform themselves and deliver insights not previously available to them. The CEO and Co-Founder of Resillo Inc. Eric Klinker will share his global forecast for edge computing and will explain why the rapid scaling of systems across every conceivable industry will not accommodate traditional thinking or traditional architectures.

The events in Europe over the past few years draw a bleak picture for the overall future of the continent. The refugee crisis, combined with rise of nationalist movements and Britain’s decision to leave the EU expanded the risk factors for the European project. But The Old Continent can again become the economic juggernaut it once was, as long as it starts using its full potential. One of the main missions of Webit.Foundation during the last 9 years is creating new opportunities for business and fostering entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Central and Eastern Europe region. This year’s Webit.Festival Europe will again become a platform for discussion between top level policy makers and business leaders from all over the continent. The Digital Economy Leadership Summit will be chaired by the President of Bulgaria Rumen Radev and co-hosted by the Head of the European Commission Representation in Bulgaria Ognian Zlatev. The summit’s discussions will focus on the topic of intelligent specialization of the countries in CEE region, that was recently analyzed by Webit’s Executive Chairman Dr. Plamen Russev on his blog. Meanwhile, the high ranked guests of the event will share their thoughts on topics, such as Cyber Security, Well Being, Ageing and Biotech, Disruptive Legislation and Digital Democracy, Boosting EU Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Digital Transformation. On Webit’s stage you can see some of the people, that are shaping the global agenda of World Economic Forum. The head of WEF for Europe and Eurasia Martina Larkin will speak about the Fourth industrial revolution and the way it will alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. Her colleague at WEF and Project leader for Fourth industrial revolution Thomas Philbeck will focus on automation and its role on the changes in employment. The President and Global brand director of Havas Worldwide Jason Jercinovic will share his thoughts about the role of artificial intelligence in modern politics and how AI will be shaping the voter’s profiles in the years to come. In the Disruptive Legislation Session the EU Commission’s Adviser Ilias Lakovidis will speak about addressing the societal challenges through digital innovation, while the Chief of the Enforcement Bureau within the Federal Communications Commission Travis LeBlanc will tell us what kind of legislation we need in order to build a better future. The Investment Director of 3TS Capital Partners Marius Ghenea will share his experience about seizing opportunities and avoiding pitfalls both from the point of view of and investor, but also from a founder’s perspective. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.