Tag: Event

As the world is going on its path towards a Gibabit society, the secured transfers of data and money are becoming a priority for individuals, businesses and governments. Recent years have shown us the huge importance of cybersecurity on our personal and corporate information. But along with the opportunities that come with our technological advancements, the treats that they pose will only become larger. A recent study showed that 70% of corporate respondents in the US had experienced a security breach in the past two years. 85% of those indicated that they have become victims of two or more breaches. The topics of Cyber Security, Privacy, Hacking, Security Software, Mobile Security and Data Encryption, among others, will be discussed during the Cybersecurity Summit of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe - the largest event for innovations and entrepreneurship in this part of the world. Meanwhile, meeting domestic and external challenges of cybersecurity on corporate and government scale will be among the main topics during the Innovate! & Plenary Session of Webit. Even technological giants, such as Facebook, are unable to handle their security in the best way possible. Which leaves our personal data and conversations vulnerable to bad actors online. At the beginning of April a vast collection of data on Facebook users was again exposed to the public on the cloud computing servers of another tech giant - Amazon. Two third-party app developers were found to have stored user data in a way that allowed it to be downloaded by the public. One of them stored data containing more than 540 million records, including comments, likes, reactions and account names. Such breack comes after the huge scandal including the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica and its role in American presidential elections and the referendum for Brexit. Cybersecurity problems like that created a demand for a huge corporate and political debate about our data online and finding ways to keep it safe. Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, there has been a lot of discussion in Western policy circles on how to deal with the so called hybrid warfare tactics. According to specialists, hybrid warfare is a coordinated an synchronized action, that deliberately targets democratic states’ and institutions systematic vulnerabilities, through a wide rangeo f means. Such activities exploit the tresholds of detection and attribution, as well as the border between war and piece. While hybrid warfare can be prevented or deterred, it can’t be easily defeated. If the social, political and economic conditions allow hybrid tactics to be effective, than it is probably too late to stop them, without making systematic changes. Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the major steps that world’s policy makers and corporate leaders will need to take to create the infrastructure of tomorrow and protect us from the threats that will come with it. During the Innovate! & Plenary Session you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Serial Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke, the Senior Parther at McKinsey & Co Paul Willmott, The VP of Amazon Web Services Sandy Carter and VP of Amazon Paul Misener, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel, the Deputy Director-General of World Trade Organization Yonov Frederick Agah and many others. During the Cybersecurity Summit you can listen to the Chief Cybersecurity Officer of Siemens, Natalia Oropeza, the Chief Scientist of McAfee, Raj Samani, the Director and Co-Founder of JVP Cyber Labs, Nimrod Kozlovski, the President of CYBERPOL & ECIPS, Ricardo Baretzky, the CEO of Infinitum Humanitarian Systems, Eric Rasmussen and other renowned experts. 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.

If there is one thing that is slowing down or evolution as social species for the last centuries, it is the lack of inclusion and equal opportunities for every person on this planet, no matter of its race, gender or nationality. Inequality is something that the future generations will most certainly view as a major stain in our history. And it is also something that we need to eradicate, in order to use our full human potential and reach the limits of our capabilities. Just take the example of the first image of a Black Hole’s event horizon. This amazing accomplishment for humanity would not be possible without the efforts of Katie Bouman - a 29-yeas old postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, who helped develop the code to find the black hole in the haystack of data collected from Event Horizon Telescope. Imagine how many amazing discoveries we could have if we are able to grant equal opportunities for education and work for every woman on this planet. In fact, many experts believe, that the process of including women on the labor market will be the main driver of economic growth in the years to come. During the last decade, Webit Foundation has made its efforts to foster this process and not just talk about empowering women in business and politics, but doing so! For the upcoming Webit.Festival Europe, we gave 1000 tickets to women in technological industries. Of course, this became a catalyst for some backlash towards us. Our Executive Chairman Plamen Russev even received an email, in which he is called a sexist for not providing the same amount of tickets for the event to men in different industries. Regardless of such views, we are more than confident that or efforts for promoting the role of Women in Tech are a step in the right direction. That is the reason why for the second year in a row Webit.Festival is doing its best to improve the ratio of women to men speakers globally. According to the annual Global Gender Gap Report of WEF, it will take 108 years to achieve overall gender parity and 202 years to achieve full equality in the workplace. As we can’t just accept such dark predictions for our future, Webit became the platform for discussing the changing role of women in business in politics in a times of dramatic changes, caused by tech advancements in areas, such as AI, Blockchain, Automation and Robotics. Eurostat’s data analytics show that Bulgaria takes the second place in EU with 49% women managers. We think that this makes Sofia, the Digital Capital, a perfect place for such discussion that would shape the future corporate and government actions towards a future that treat every person as equal. Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the major steps that world’s policy makers and corporate leaders will need to take to equal opportunities for everyone. During Innovate! & Plenary Session you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Serial Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke, the Senior Parther at McKinsey & Co Paul Willmott, The VP of Amazon Web Services Sandy Carter and VP of Amazon Paul Misener, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel, the Deputy Director-General of World Trade Organization Yonov Frederick Agah and many others. 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.

The developed economies of the world are rapidly transforming into Gigabit societies of ultra-fast connections, while our lives are increasingly influenced by phenomenons such as AI, VR, IOT and robotics. The processes we were discussing during Webit.Festival years ago are the reality of today. We have already passed the 4 billion mark of internet users globally, while more than 80% of the population of Europe is using the web on a daily basis. This exponential digital transformation of our everyday life require some major system changes that will shape the Infrastructure 4.0 and will enable people and businesses to reap the benefits of all the new opportunities that are presented to them. According to Gartner, the EU tech spending for software products will increase by 7.23% on a yearly basis for the next half decade, while the spending for IT services will reach $38.6 billion in 2022. This, among many other topics, will be discussed during the Innovate! & Plenary Session of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe - the largest event for innovations and entrepreneurship in this part of the world. Experts believe that 5G networks will be rolled out for consumers and enterprise leaders from 2020, when the compatible telecom equipment and devices are available. The new 5G network will use radio spectrum four times as efficiently as the old 4G. This will be a huge factor that will help us meet the growing demand for mobile data. The larger demand comes from the rise of IOT devices and the fact that far more things than just our smartphones are and will be connected to the internet. “The question of how we can speed up infrastructure delivery and improve asset utilization has never been more important. By 2025, 60% of the world’s population will live in cities. Instead of traffic-congested cities with unhealthy levels of pollution, we need to create environments that are good for people and businesses”, says the CTO and Managing Board Member of Siemens Roland Bursch in his recent article. While the development of 5G networks is crucial to our future infrastructure, it could also pose a huge security risk for our information resources. Recently the US authorities expressed their concerns that Huawei 5G networks might be used by the Chinese government for espionage - both on military and corporate level. The Trump administration sees this as part of a new arms race, where the winner would gain an economic, intelligence and military edge for a better part of the century. The fact that many US allies refused to ban the Chinese company from 5G networks caused a huge diplomatic rift inside NATO countries that will unfold in the next two years. Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the major steps that European policy makers and corporate leaders will need to take to create a secure job market for us and for the generations to come. During Innovate! & Plenary Session you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Serial Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke, the Senior Parther at McKinsey & Co Paul Willmott, The VP of Amazon Web Services Sandy Carter and VP of Amazon Paul Misener, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel, the Deputy Director-General of World Trade Organization Yonov Frederick Agah and many others. 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.

Over the next few years the world will undergo spectacular changes, driven by the rapid development of new technologies. Only prepared people can be successful in this new complex and increasingly digital world. Creating such people is among the biggest missions of Webit.Festival - the most influential forum for digital economy and technology in Europe. The event begins in less than a month, and the tickets for it are already running out. This year, Webit.Festival will gather in Sofia Tech Park more than 300 speakers from every corner of the world. Within two days (25th and 26th of April) they will share invaluable experience from the largest enterprises in the digital industry and will explain to more than 5000 attendees from 90+ countries the key factors that will shape our future. The agenda consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, round tables and exhibitions, such as: Marketing & Innovation Summit, Digital Transformation Summit, FinTech & Blockchain Summit, Big Data & Cloud Summit, Security & Privacy Summit, Health & Wellbeing Summit, IoE Summit, Mobility Summit, Smart Cities Summit, Digital Economy Leadership Summit and a series of social events. Here you may find a full list of the confirmed speakers. Part of our mission is helping startups with great ideas present themselves to a wider audience and giving them a chance to compete for a seed investment in Webit’s Founders Games. Webit.Festival gathers 100 of the most promising startups from all over the world. During the event they get the opportunity to pitch their ideas in front of an audience of business leaders, policy-makers and investors from more than 90 countries. This year our prize is €200 000.That is why a separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and the world.

“We are creating density of opportunities for Bulgaria and the world. We are drawing in Sofia the most innovative companies in the world, policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs and scientific communities and motivate them to work together for a better life for the people through development of entrepreneurship and innovations”, says the Executive Chairman of Webit.Foundation Plamen Russev.

The event is a brilliant way to stimulate your mind and imagination so that today we can be where our competitors will be tomorrow. It acts as a compass and a barometer, giving us an image of the situation worldwide and setting our development direction for the coming years. Come to Webit.Festival and adapt in the best possible way to the changes of the future. You may book your ticket for the event here.

Any expert in the world will tell l you that in the era of Internet, videos are the best way to advertise your products and services. And hardly the world has a bigger sport for TV commercials than the several hours during the NFL’s Super Bowl. More than a half of the marketers worldwide name video as the content with best return of investment, while experts forecast that by 2020 it will account for 82% of all consumer internet traffic. The biggest single event in American sports pulled in 111.3 million viewers in the USA on Sunday night, down slightly from last year’s game numbers. Despite the epic comeback in the 34-28 overtime win of New England Patriots over Atlanta Falcons, marketers around the world were more interested in the annual Super Bowl commercials, than Tom Brady’s bid for greatest quarterback in the history of the league. The average spending for a 30-second commercial slot this year was around $5 million. But this is something that most of the biggest companies, that are seeking brand visibility, are willing to pay. This year the top level marketers in USA tried to reach their audience with a mix of emotional and political messages, that reflects the recent months of turbulence in the American society. Here are the 5 best ads, aired during Super Bowl 2017: Airbnb’s “We Accept” message Audi’s “Daughter” Budweiser’s tribute to its immigrant co-founder Adolphus Busch Coca Cola’s “America, the Beautiful” The Skittles romantic rainbow If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of marketing Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During the Marketing & Innovations Summit, you can listen to top level speakers such as the Chief Creative Officer at DigitasLBi Chris Clarke, who was recently placed at 53th place in The Drum’s Adverati list of the most influential people in advertising.