Tag: future

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.

Whether we like it or not, we are going to spend the rest of our lives in the future. This means that it will be a lot better for our common good to start building the one we want to live in. Right now we are witnessing an age in which the reality is moving ahead of science fiction and even Hollywood can’t catch up with the rapid changes in our daily lives. This year, Webit.Festival will address the transformation processes that are shaping the digital economy of the future in Europe and the world. The event will be held on 25-26 April in Sofia Tech Park under the patronage of the President of Bulgaria Rumen Radev, the Mayor of Sofia Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The 5000 attendees, coming from more than 90 countries will have the chance to see 300 top speakers, who will share their vision for the future during 12 parallel conferences, covering fields, such as Marketing & Innovation, Digital Economy Leadership, Smart Cities, Mobility, Digital Transformation, FinTech & Blockchain, Big Data & Cloud, Security & Privacy, Health & Wellbeing, IoE and Software Development. During the Digital Transformation Summit you will get the chance to listen to the Chief Designer of SAP, Martin Wezowski, among many others. Before he started working for a big corporation, he studied construction engineering and modern media production technologies. He also had a career in music, which he left behind few years ago. In a recent interview, Wezowski explained that playing in a band and managing it as a business have him a 360-view of a product life cycle, from the initial idea to getting customers to return and eventually to building up a fan base.

“You need to understand every tiny detail and at the same time see the full strategic overview. It was very educational”, he said.

At Webit, Martin Wezowski will explain to the audience why what it means to be an innovator and designer is merging. It is transforming faster than before, from classic styling of the superficial to system design of everything, including social and political systems, deeply rooted in a space of challenges and promises between cutting edge tech and humanism. In an increasingly exponential and converging digital change, we design a relationship, a behavior, that the product will follow. This change is our most important design brief and the stakes are high, it is just too important to be left only to designers. Martin Wezowski believe that everything can and should be given a purpose through innovation and design, including the innovation systems themselves.

A New Doctrine for intelligence specialization of CEE region empowering the future of Europe

  The future of Europe is at stake, and the reasons extend far beyond obvious challenges such as the migration crisis and the political turbulence that led to Brexit. For the last 12 years, the European Union’s share of global GDP has fallen from nearly 32% to only about 23%. Although it is difficult to imagine the continent again becoming the center of global manufacturing, the EU still has the tools to reverse this trend. We can take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution - a wave of digital-era change - and push the region to a period of sustained growth, through a combination of long-term policies, innovation and cooperation between governments and businesses. Central and Eastern Europe has the potential to play a very substantial role in the continent’s future. For the last five years, the region registered an impressive growth in Information Communication Technology (ICT) as a share of its GDP (in Bulgaria, for instance, it rose from 1.3% in 2012 to 3.3% in 2016). Instead of competing within the region’s smaller markets, we can create targeted intelligent specialization, drawing on existing areas of expertise as well as creating new new ones. This way one country’s industry will be able to expand into the broader European market, without having to compete within the region. Just a quick look at the Central and Eastern Europe’s investment market will show you that Poland has a very well developed start-up ecosystem in a number of sectors, but with substantial value concentrated in marketing automation. Тhere is already one unicorn (Allegro) and two more (SALESmanago and Growbots) on the way. Meanwhile, the video gaming industry boasts CD Projekt. These are two of the most promising verticals with established know-how and success in today’s Poland. Meanwhile, Czech Republic and Romania have become real pillars of European cyber security, with startups such as Avast Software, Bitdefender and TypingDNA, while my home country Bulgaria already has its own ICT success in the software development company Telerik, that was acquired by Progress Software for $262.5 million in 2014. In Slovakia, the advanced engineering company AeroMobil is developing the world’s first flying car and is expecting to start taking orders this year. Fostering further these areas of strength, supporting them with focused education and talents from within the region would make a huge difference for the region and further for the future of Europe. With a more in-depth study I am convinced that we can easily make a list of several specifications for each country and create strategies for regional development. The fourth industrial revolution and its new technologies are going to be the guiding light on our path to a better future. But industrial and economic innovation can’t be achieved without the needed legislation and government support. Just as Luxembourg has become the first country in the world with laws regulating the mining for resources in space, and Estonia was the first country that introduced electronic citizenship, we have to think about the right legislation to support the digital development of CEE. One possible example comes from Albania, where startups have the opportunity to launch with zero taxes until a certain amount of revenue has been established. We also need clear specialization from early the early school years to prepare our children for the needs of the future labour market. Nowadays very few people benefit from their knowledge of physics and chemistry. And teaching our children to code (as it is becoming mainstream currently) is the same as training them to drive a cab – it is a skill that will not help them find a job after the automation reaches its full potential. We need to rebuild our education systems so as to inspire critical thinking, creativity and teamwork, because this will be the skill that the future industry will demand the most. Achieving economic transformation of this magnitude will require not only legislative initiatives, but also state support in the form of subsidies and reduction of the administrative burden on the new businesses. The advanced technology startups in Europe are on the rise and now more than ever we need to support and invest in them, because this will be an investment in our common future. It can happen through new platforms for public-private partnership and targeted acceleration with government’s support. In many aspects the industry of Central and Eastern Europe is still stuck in the Soviet age. In recent years governments in the region talk more and more about the re-industrialisation of their countries. But instead of pouring money into new manufacturing capacity, states should support their brightest minds with more efficient programs for seed and next-round investments. About the author: Dr. Plamen Russev is serial entrepreneur, investors and philanthropist. He is the Executive Chairman of Webit.Foundation and the Global Webit Series - among the largest tech and digital events for EMEA, MENA, APAC and India. More info: www.russev.com

The global economy becomes increasingly digital and decentralized and only those, who adapt best, will be able to survive in the new world economic order. Over the next decade the world will have to deal with problems, such as manufacturing automation and changing labour market, rising cyber crime, overpopulation of the planet and the aging population in developed economies. For the last 12 years European Union’s percentage of the global GDP has fallen from nearly 32% to only about 23%. The main reasons for that are the outsourcing of production and the better position of countries like China and India had for managing the effects of the global economic crisis. But EU still has the tools to remain a leader of the civilized world and to be the engine of the new digital economy. As long as it starts using the full potential of its member states and expand their economic capabilities in the best way possible, while maximizing their human capital. This can happen through smart specialization and shared goals and vision. Two years ago the commissioner for digital economy Andrus Ansip forecasted that Europe can achieve a 10% rise in its e-commerce with a digital single market. The former Estonian prime minister was one of the top guests during Webit’s CEEDS event, which was focused on the digital perspectives for the Central end Eastern Europe region. The idea for a digital single market has become one of the top missions of the European Commission for the years to come and can boost the block’s economy with an annual growth of €165 billion and 1.3% of continent’s GDP. This year Webit continues its mission of hosting top level policy discussion about the digital future of the continent. The Digital Economy Leadership Summit of this years Webit.Festival will again become a platform for presenting the best ideas for the future development of European industry with a focus on the most disadvantaged regions. The event will gather some of the most influential policy makers and top level experts, that shape the global agenda of the World Economic Forum, like the Global Leadership Fellow at WEF Thomas Philibeck, the Head of Europe and Eurasia at WEF Martina Larkin,the President & Global Brand Director of Havas Worldwide Jason Jerinovic and the Director General of Digital Europe John Higgins. They will share their vision and experience in topics, such as automation technologies and the changing balance of the social contract between governments, employers and individuals, how AI is shaping up the profile of the voters and what are the things Europe must do to defend its leadership position under the growing pressures from internal and external events.

In marketing you always have to be one step ahead of the pack and if you don’t have a crystal ball in your office, the best way to be switched on the trends of the future is to build a better understanding about the technological advancements of today. In fact new tech is more than just an engine of the digital age marketing. It is a generator for new types of customer demand and market shifts. According to Entrepreneur Magazine’s poll, 51.9% of the marketers worldwide named video as the content type that gives the best return of investment. Meanwhile Cisco predicts that by 2020 video will account for 82% of all consumer internet traffic. This hot trend is visible even in the media coverage as more and more outlets prefer to share a viral short and texted clip on their timeline instead of writing an long analytical piece on the topic. The reason for the new strategy is the new life dynamics and the inability of users to hold their attention on something for more than minute and a half. Social media already promotes the video content in their algorithms, while Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg forecasted that within five years the social network will be mostly filled with video. About 43% of people online want to see more video content from marketers, but social media gives even more effective ways to communicate directly with the customer. One example of that is the the Snapchat geofilter that gives businesses the capability to customize ads and to target them to the users in specific location and time, for example the attendees on a concert, sports event or Webit.Festival 2017. Apps like Snapchat are becoming a prefered advertising option because of the limited lifespan posts they are providing. That way companies can run ad campaigns that disappear after a set period of time. Instagram already launched their own feature for this type of marketing activity. Five9’s CMO Kevin Garvin thinks that in 2017 video customer service will finally go mainstream and will be a powerful tool to ease communication problems in an easy and efficient manner. Part of the reason is the advance in marketing tech, that gives small and midsized marketers sophisticated tools with small budget. Many companies that never considered advertising on TV can now add an online video strategy to their program for B2C communication. Last year was big for live streaming as every major social network has incorporated this in its platform. But before they start streaming the marketers first have to carefully think about ideas for authentic instant content. 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.