Tag: Data

There is so much buzz around the new EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

At Webit we are firmly committed to privacy and data protection and we are happy to confirm that we, too, have taken all necessary steps to ensure [full] compliance with the GDPR. All necessary controls and features are in place so you can continue to use our service with confidence.

Feel free to check out our updated Privacy Statement to understand more about the types of information we may collect, how we use it, and why we request it.

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SPECIAL 50% DISCOUNT

We also want to take this opportunity to let you know that Webit is welcoming this new era of data privacy by providing all our subscribers a special "DATA present” 50% off from all tickets for Webit.Fetsival Europe 2018 starting this Friday, 25 May till 29 May.

We release a total of 250 tickets for this special "DATA Present".

Register here

and join Webit.Festival Europe with a special discount of 50% on all tickets with code: GDPR

 

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Though the moderator of the panel was still sitting on his plane, being late for leading the discussion, the Advisor at 8VC Jon Soberg, the founder and co-CEO of H-Farm Maurizio Rosi & the Investment Director at iTech Capital Alexey Telnov managed to deliver their experience and insights in the discussion about Investments in FinTech at Webit.Festival 2017. Stay tuned with the latest innovations by booking a ticket to Webit.festival Europe 2018 Technology is changing everything, in all sectors, businesses and business models and has an impact on society in the daily lives of millions of people. Technology is effective once it’s combined with the next generation.

FinTech is data

Money is data too, they represent the value. As we’ve already entered a “data age”, there’s much more consciousness about the data. From online payments through digital wallets and asset management, this is a pretty vast area of settling a company and acquiring a market segment of. As for FinTech where the area has been controlled by the big banks and large organizations until recently, now we see more and more startups creating new products and truly having an impact. Even though it’s getting more crowded in the last few years, this market still provides probably the biggest opportunity that’s out there in terms of a market.

One of the advantages of investing in FinTech is that one always knows where the money come from

By default, FinTech companies are dealing with money so that makes an investor’s job easier in order to track the flows. This area is fairly straightforward when it comes to a particular business model and the way the business works. The market for financial services is more than enough large so nobody has to ask questions about the size of the market or how companies in the sector will make money. The question is whether they can execute and succeed. The buzz in FInTech naturally raises the question of security: security solutions and their integration in FinTech products and services. Companies are putting more and more information on the cloud so security is a sensitive issue in all areas and needs to be paid proper attention to. Companies operating in this domain need to deal with regulations, licences and still find a way to keep their customers data secure.  

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 need to go back to good, credible and authentic storytelling that brings value to the consumer

The notion of change is essential in the 21st century. We are developing way faster than we thought we would in 2008, for example. We now consider diseases treatable, in comparison with just 10 years back; companies have to adapt to change, but this would be impossible without certain people - people who envision the future, who encompass change and apply it. Chris Kubbernus, or Kubby, as his friends call him, named #1 Business Guru on Snapchat by Forbes, will be among the speakers at Webit.Innovate! Summit at the next Webit.Festival Europe 2018 on 26th - 27th June 2018. The one thing Chris wishes people to remember out of his talk would be that things change. According to him, companies today are not using technologies to their fullest potential - not seeing what’s happening in the marketplace and cannot react adequately.

“ If you say to an organization: 'I think you should use Snapchat, or get on Instagram', they’d roll their eyes and say: 'Why would we do that?’ What they don’t realize is that these things quickly become mainstream, and that’s where they’re losing. They’re actually ignoring what’s going on in the marketplace, thinking that it’s just a trend and therefore not doing anything about it. Change happens and organizations have to recognize that and act on it before it gets too expensive.”

Chris is originally from Canada, but he likes to say that he was “imported in Denmark” by his wife. The difference in the two continents is obvious, in terms of marketing, but what exactly Chris finds drastically different is:

Americans and Canadians are more trusting in their advertising. If you make a claim, they might take that as face value, whereas I think with Europeans, you have to have a more soft approach.

Living in Northern Europe, Scandinavians, he continues have a different approach to advertisement. People there are more likely to doubt the quality of the product whereas the Americans would trust the ad and will expect the same results.

In social media, I find that Europeans are more conservative. They are less likely to share and like something or to engage with content. I think it takes a lot to move them to action, where in North America, in particular, it seems to be easier. People are more relaxed towards sharing on social media and voicing their opinions.

Chris was a speaker at the first Snapchat conference - we saw the rise of Snapchat, we all know those Snapchat glasses, don’t we. We are now also seeing the fall of Snapchat as a platform, it doesn't attract so much audience, in fact, its users are youngsters. It just somehow feels Snapchat will not last much longer, although, Chris says,  you have to wonder why the biggest social networks in the world are mimicking what Snapchat did.

“ I think, in a way, Snapchat is being replaced by Instagram. Instagram is doing a very good job of copying and making their own new features. But Snapchat is a playground, still much more than Instagram. And Facebook sees that they are losing the younger generation, so I think that if Snapchat can continue being the anti-Facebook, they will stay relevant. They just need to retain that identity. “

Besides Facebook, another huge platform is so very widely used - Instagram. The main differences in the two platforms, Chris explains like this:

On Facebook, content is consumed slower and with more thought. People are less likely to like on Facebook, whereas on Instagram, there’s less exposure and more anonymity. Instagram is a little hedonistic in some ways, while Facebook is your core of friends and family, where you have to be more ‘considerate'.

Unlike some other social platforms, like Snapchat, for example, Facebook will be present in our lives for many more years. It is a place where you can document your entire life and in terms of ‘replacing’, Instagram will not replace Facebook as a social media platform. At the end of the day, “both platforms are playgrounds for displaying different parts of our personalities”. My social media predictions for 2018 is a continuation and examination of influencer-marketing and how much we let social media influence us, says Kubby. The psychological effect of social media will continue to determine the way we communicate and perceive information and the trend of what is real and what is fake will determine the consumer’s behaviour.

“ Right now, digital marketing is losing consumers because of disinterest and mistrust in fake influencer-marketing. We need to go back to good, credible and authentic storytelling that brings value to the consumer. “

Sriram Prakash, the Global Lead for Innovation M&A and Venturing Services at Deloitte was one of the speakers at Webit.Festival Investments Summit who shared his insight about fueling growth through innovation M&A.

 

Living in an economy of expectations

An innovation can come from anywhere.It can come from a small unknown town in India, it can come from a booming city like New York, it can come from anywhere. If you want to turn your innovation into a billion dollar business though, you need some extra things than the idea itself.  You need an ecosystem, you need entrepreneurs and corporates, you need the governments and different policy makers. And in fact, there are very few cities and ecosystems allowing you to do that but this doesn’t mean that your ideas can’t travel. Ideas have no boundaries anymore and that’s become quite an advantage for all market players. Markets are full of uncertainty today, they are getting saturated and there’s a backlash against globalization. For the past three years revenue growth rates has been on the decline but the share price are on the rise. That’s why innovation has become such a strong priority for companies to grow. Mergers & acquisitions is one of the ways for companies to tap into innovations happening outside of their private ecosystem rather than trying to focus on purely growing organically.

More and more non-technological companies are investing in and acquiring tech companies

This means that a nowadays startup has the option of not just one but more exits and more than one sectors that could be interested in its particular innovation. The process is not one-way only. It’s not only old companies trying to go into digital. Startup companies are also buying some old style companies depending on their needs. Most of the disruptors under the scope of corporates are AI, Robotics, Big Data, Analytics and IoT, finally coming to a stage where the commercial potential can be realised. Venture capital & investment companies trying to get their way through the field should be better in the way of trying to find what people want rather than trying to invent the next Facebook or Uber. The biggest battle is for the future of consumers and the consumer industry as changing as it is. Companies of different sectors are merging and acquiring others out of their area of business and specialization. We see healthcare industry mixing with Fintech, IoT with Data and all together. For the first time there’s a genuine convergence between non-traditional sectors converging around a particular opportunity.

The AI Health Tech subsidiary of Google, Deep Mind Health, is creating a system, based on the blockchain technology, to show how the company uses all the medical data that passes through its processors. The “Verifiable Data Audit” will allow hospitals, doctors and even patients to track their personal information in real-time and see if it has been changed or compromised. Deep Mind is trying to improve medical diagnosis with machine learning. But for developing those tools requires large amounts of confidential data. The company was already criticized, after gaining access to patient records for 1.6 million people in three London hospitals. With its new project, Deep Mind will try to win back some of the lost trust.

“Data can be a powerful force for social progress, helping our most important institutions to improve how they serve their communities. As cities, hospitals and transport systems find new ways to understand what people need from them, they’re unearthing opportunities to change how they work today and identifying existing ideas for the future”, the company’s Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a blog post.

It is working in partnership with London’s Royal Free Hospital to develop kidney monitoring software called Streams, but critics still feel that data sharing can give Google too much power over the National Health System. According to Suleyman, data can only benefit society if it has society’s trust and confidence and that is the reason why auditability becomes an increasingly important virtue. He explained that any entry will record the fact that a particular piece of data has been used and also the reason why, for example a blood test was checked against the NHS national algorithm to detect possible acute kidney injury. The new systems are related to the bitcoin cryptocurrency and just like blockchain, the ledger will be append-only, so once a record of data use is added, it can’t be erased later. The ledger will also make it possible for third parties to verify that nobody has tampered with any of the entries. Meanwhile, Google announced a series of new tools to assist users with data preparation and integration, which will upgrade the power and agility of Google Cloud for business clients. The first released product is the new private beta of Google Cloud Dataprep. The tool is visualizing the data preparation, detecting anomalies and using machine learning to suggest data transformation that can improve the quality of information. To learn more about the latest trends in FinTech & Blockchain, Health Tech and Big Data & Cloud visit Webit.Festival Europe in Sofia on April 25 and 26. During the event you can listen to top level speakers, such as the Vice President for Cloud and Mobile Technology Strategy at IBM Jonas Jacobi, the Global Head of FinTech at ING Group Benoit Legrand and the Consultant Surgeon and Co-founder of Virtual Medics and Medical Realities Prof. Shafi Ahmed.

Reducing the size of computer components is a process that never stops surprising us over the past few decades. But IBM managed to shock even the biggest tech enthusiasts, announcing that it has managed to read and write data into a single atom. Although the achievement is still far from its practical application, it is a clear evidence that the concept of atomic data storage is more than accomplishable in the near future. Today’s hard drives take about 100 000 atoms to store a single bit of data, but IBM’s experiment just showed us how much more we can work to improve the computing and storing processes we know now. According to the company, when the technology of atom storage is fully developed, the entire Apple music catalog will be stored in a hard drive with the size of a coin. Тhis has the potential to drastically change the way we see our computing devices. Few years ago we could not imagine that one phone can store hundreds of gigabytes of information, but now this is just one of many remarkable features of the top products on the market. In the near future our wearable gadgets like smartwatches or rings could carry all our personal data. That kind of advance will be really big for the industry, that is expected to generate 17.6 trillion gigabytes of data by the end of 2017. In order to store and analyze all that information, enterprises are going to have to increase their spending. IDC predicts that worldwide revenue for big data and business analytics will grew from nearly $122 billion in 2015 to more than $187 billion in 2019. That is a 50% increase over five years. More than half of that spending will go to services providers, while companies will spend about $55 billion on big data software and $28 billion on hardware in 2019. Sectors like utilities, resource industries, healthcare and banking are likely to see their big data spending rise the fastest, while manufacturing will remain the biggest big data spender overall. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of data usage and analytics Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During the Big Data & Cloud Summit, you can listen to top level speakers such as the VP for Cloud and Mobile Technology Strategy at IBM Jonas Jacobi and the CTO of Intel Security for EMEA region Raj Samani. 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.

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.

After a landmark year, in which companies worldwide began to analyze databases of all forms and sizes we can expect systems supporting large volumes of structured and unstructured information to continue rising. We know well that there is huge amount of valuable information in the corporate world, but there are few companies that are using its full potential. The data that your company already owns can show you a lot about the way your customers are thinking, what do they want and what they are thinking about your brand. Market already demands platforms and services for data management and security. In the same time we are going to see a lot of tools, that empowers users to analyze that data. Today Big Data is not something, that only enterprise use. In fact it is a game changer for every industry and is even messing in the political life. As Vice’s Motherboard reported, data analysis from social media is among the key factors for the victory of Donald Trump in the USA presidential elections. Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method to analyze people based on their Facebook activity. Five years ago he proved that it is possible to predict user’s skin colour, sexual orientation, political affiliation, intelligence, religion and even alcohol use on the basis of just 68 “likes” in the social media. This type of analytics can bring enormous benefits for the business because it can be used not only for creation of psychological profiles, but also for searching them around the web. Expert believe that in 2017 many small and midsize companies will form strategies for taking more of their applications to the cloud and out of the data centers. This will save them costs of investment in equipment and will lead them towards subscribing to services. Moving data analytics to the cloud will accelerate the process of turning your data into action. Big Data will help businesses to precisely predict future behaviors and events and improve their profits. This will be a key factor for minimizing revenue risk exposure and improving of operational effectiveness. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of data usage and analytics Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During the Big Data & Cloud Summit, you can listen to top level speakers such as the VP for Cloud and Mobile Technology Strategy at IBM Jonas Jacobi and the CTO of Intel Security for EMEA region Raj Samani.