Tag: innovation

Happy Women's Day! On a personal note - I am a male feminist. Since we have founded the non-for-profit Webit.Foundation, Webit's mission has been improving the state of well-being through empowering entrepreneurship and women in business and politics! I am grateful to all global leaders and friends who support us during the past 11 years! I cannot be more happy to announce on 8 March 1000 free tickets for women for Europe's leading Innovation and Tech Forum - Webit.Festival Europe 2019: - 225 free tickets for women-coders - 225 free tickets for women-in-tech (general business, innovation) - 225 tickets for women in academia and research - 225 tickets for women in politics. But ... we believe communities are build around shared necessities! Thus we request every woman who takes advantage of this special present to give back as little as 10% of the price of the ticket to the community of Bulgarian disadvantaged women. We shall double on your donation and shall provide free Webit tickets to them.

APPLY OR NOMINATE A FEMALE FRIEND FOR A FREE TICKET*
*you pay only 10% of the ticket price and it goes as donation for tickets for disadvantaged women.

I am proud to share that Webit.Festival is a good example in regards to ratio between female to male speakers. And while we still strive to involve more and more women in business and politics as speakers, I am so grateful to all these global leaders - amazing ladies who have already accepted our invite to join Webit! Furthermore our 2019 host country Bulgaria (according to official statistics by Eurostat) is the leader in Europe with with 31.02% women in ICT.  The average for EU is almost 2 times less - 16.7%! Happy Women's Day and I look forward to see you over 13-15 May in Sofia @ Webit.Festival Europe! Warm regards, Plamen Russev

Webit.Foundations provides grants to over 1500 startups/scaleups! For the past 10 years Webit is selecting the best of the best founders and we help them with mentoring and funding rounds through direct introductions, 1:1 meetings, opportunities to pitch at Webit stages... Apply today and get an opportunity to connect with over: - 500 investors - thousands of potential partners and clients - global business leaders from Fortune 500 companies - 500+ accredited journalists

Apply today for free

Mark Cuban

the world famous entrepreneur, investors and celebrity from Shark Tank is joining Webit.Festival and will spend 3 days in Sofia with us. Are you?

   

Connect with 500+ investors

We host many family offices, corporate ventures (BMW ventures, IBM Ventures, Intel Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Novartis Ventures Fund, Pro Sieben Ventures, Time Warner Investments, GE Ventures, Microsoft Ventures to name a few), VCs including 500 Startups, Happinnes Ventures, Speedinvest, LUMA Ventures, CREDO Ventures, Early Bird Capital, Open Ocean, many business angels and best accelerators from all around the world @ Webit.Festival Europe and the Founders Games. 200 of them are members of the Founders Games Jury and will hear your pitch on the stage if among the selected startups/scaleups.

One last thing.

5 of all selected startups will pitch in front of 3600 people auditorium for the Founders Games prestigious award - to be named Webit's top startup and ...guess who is going to be the jury!  

... and unlike anywhere else - at Webit all this comes for free!* Webit.Foundation is committed to improving the state of the well being through empowering entrepreneurship! Our grants are funded by the success of Webit.Festival and we provide all these opportunities for no price to the selected startups. * (If selected a single transaction of 80 EUR is expected to cover your branding package.) The keyword is selected - we only select the best! Apply today and join the Webit list!

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If you look just 10 years back...

you can easily see the rapid evolution of digital industry. Everything is smart - phones, watches, we even have home AI assistants so that our homes can be smart. At this point we cannot and we don’t want to imagine the world without the technological advantages. More or less, this is normal: for the century we live in, for our jobs, for our life nowadays. So 10 years in our century is a period in which A LOT can change. Just a few months ago Webit celebrated its 10-year anniversary. The festival grew rapidly to become one of Europe’s (and even world’s) largest forums for innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, policy and startups. /You can watch the trailer here: https://youtu.be/695bBvsv6vQ/ Webit.Festival gathers tech, digital and policy elite to re-invent and pave the digital future of Europe.

This year is no exception.

We would like to introduce you to some of our confirmed 2019 speakers. So in the next few weeks we will share some interesting information about the amazing line up that we are preparing for this year’s Festival.

Today we’d like you to meet 5 Innovation Gurus:

On the Innovate Stage you will see: Dr. Goertzel is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence. (It is a subfield of AI oriented toward creating thinking machines with general cognitive capability at the human level and beyond.) Ben also has decades of expertise applying AI to practical problems in areas ranging from natural language processing and data mining to robotics, video gaming, national security and bioinformatics. He has published 20 scientific books and 140+ scientific research papers. He is also the main architect and designer of the OpenCog system and associated design for human-level general intelligence. Dr. Viral Shah is CEO of Julia Computing, co-creator of the Julia programming language and winner of the 2019 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software. He implemented a risk management system for derivatives trading on the National Stock Exchange in India. Viral co-authored Rebooting India with Nandan Nilekan. He is also co-founder of Infosys and founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, which has delivered unique bio-metric identification to 1.2 billion Indians in the past decade. Rebooting India describes Nandan and Viral's experience implementing a large-scale technology project in government. Viral and his co-creators started Julia as a hobby but it is now their full time occupation at Julia Computing. Julia is the fastest dynamic programming language for numeric and scientific computing, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Julia is free and open source and is used by more than 10,000 enterprises and 1,500 universities with over 2 million downloads, 1,900+ packages and 800+ open source contributors. Leila Janah is the Founder and CEO of Samasource and LXMI, two companies that go beyond charity to #givework to low-income people around the world using cutting-edge social enterprise models in technology and luxury skincare, respectively. She is the author of the book Give Work (Penguin/RandomHouse). Leila is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a former Director of CARE USA, a TechFellow, recipient of the inaugural Club de Madrid Young Leadership Award, and also the youngest person to win a Heinz Award in 2014. She is one of Fortune’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs. And she was the subject of cover stories in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Conscious Company Magazines. Oisin Hanrahan is a serial entrepreneur with deep knowledge of two-sided marketplaces and a keen interest in technology and politics. Oisin is currently the co-founder and CEO of Handy which he founded in 2012. Handy is changing the way that people book and provide home services. From home cleaning to TV mounting, smart home setup to furniture assembly, people turn to Handy for a seamless, fast and top-quality experience that provides them with access to the home services they need. Oisin also advises and invests in startups, particularly in New York City. Major media extensively featured Oisin’s work, including CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

And last but not least, a dear Webit friend -

Martin Wezowski, has been loving and living design and tech his whole career. As Chief Designer for SAP's Innovation Center Network & Chief Innovation Office he crafts future outlooks, strategies and products, defines and runs innovation frameworks to find out what’s next for SAP and the future of work. He frequently shares his passion for the future of technology and design (TEDx, SXSW, CES, Ada Lovelace, CeBIT, MOBx, Grace Hopper, SIME, MLOVE etc.). He builds on his international adventures stretching from Poland, Sweden, China to Germany and across companies like SAP, Sony and Huawei, working with consumer electronics, media services and business software.

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Тake advantage of the special Early bird prices and book your ticket for Webit.Festival Europe 2019 for as low as 100 EUR!

Hsuan Lee, the VP of Engineering of COBINHOOD, the first zero trading fee exchange in the world, and as of January this year - came to Webit.Festival 2018 in Sofia and discussed the topic of blockchain implementation and future.

The DApps Era is coming

Back in 1991, many of you remember when the websites obsession was huge - the largest companies began with it. The transition towards search engines like Google and Yahoo was more or less smooth until they became viral. The appearance of sharing platforms appeared naturally - youtube, myspace, blogspots, etc. Some of the platforms disrupted and stayed, others disappeared and many, many more appeared. A couple of years ago Messenger,whatsapp and instagram, to name a few - everybody talked about these and while they’re widely used today, the hype over them disappeared. In 2017 - 2018  the most talked about technology advancements are the crypto-blockchain platforms. We are, very naturally, transitioning towards DApps era - or post apps era, role of apps is increasing and becoming more important rather than steady. All of this transition may seem ‘natural’, however, appearance and longevity process is way more difficult. Geoffrey A. Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” theory applies to basically any sphere. Hsuan explained the technology adoption cycle in the following way: The innovators are about 2,5 % of all the population. The heart of all high tech startups is a product that spawned from a small group of passionate scientists.

The early adopters take up about 13,5 %.

This is the ‘chasm’ to which companies pay little attention to once a company is over hyped by the success of market entry. This is the worst place to be, characterized by low scalability, high transaction latency and high transaction fees. The early (34%) and late (34%) majority are the largest part and the most secure phases in a company's development. There are, however, cases when the company fails - the ‘laggards’ as Hsuan calls them - are about 16% of all. Blockchain adoption by companies will be as difficult process as the transition from appearance of apps to their everyday viral usage. It will happen, however.

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Missed the 2018 edition of Webit.Festival Europe? Don’t miss the 2019! Get your super early bird 2in1 tickets – 2 for the price of 1 here!

Health is so important to all of us, it requires change. How do we create a better future for all of us?

In healthcare around the world there's change in quality, sometimes poor access. How do we enable technology to deliver the things that we all aspire? - to make healthcare free for all at a high quality. That's the role of Health.Summit chaired by prof. Shafi Ahmed. Medicine is the perfect example of how the fourth industrial revolution is changing all of us.

What about Europe?

We need data and insights on the health of European citizens, on how we organize care, and on how much our health systems cost. The EC joined forces with the OECD and the Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, and analyzed each EU country. The reports show that our healthcare needs to be more effective, accessible and resilient. For example, 80% of healthcare costs are spent on treating chronic diseases, but just a fraction on prevention. Shifting on prevention not only tackles inequalities in health and quality of life, but also offers an enormous economic return. Today, one in four patients have no access to a family doctor or a local health center, and have to go to an emergency department. With available and affordable primary care we can avoid unnecessary hospital admissions. Too often patients are searching for the best possible treatment in a maze of scattered health services. Integrated care, where all care providers work more closely together delivers better results for patients. "The state of Health" in the EU links the strengths and challenges in the different European countries to common health priorities across the EU. The reports help policymakers make relevant and efficient choices so all of us can enjoy a healthy future.

Teaching tens of thousands of people together to improve the education resources.

As a global surgeon prof. Shafi Ahmed thinks about how to scale the learning and education around the world. Now we are connected with cables, by phones and satellites. And because we are connected now we can reach far more. We have social media to connect with people.  We are changing the paradigm of the doctor-patient relationship using AI, chat bots, deep machine learning, avatars and holograms. In the next 2-5 years we are going to communicate in a different way. The human interaction will little bit disappear because it is too expensive.

I thought "How can I connect with people around the world? Let's connect my avatar with other avatars in America, in India. Can they come to my theater together in this virtual space? They call me the Virtual Surgeon.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4T49_zz3HA[/embed]

Imagine someone operating on the other side of the globe, calling you and saying: "I need some advice, can you come?" Plane travel - too long, inefficient. What about transporting yourself as a hologram?

Shafi Ahmed has been spending a lot of time talking about how we use technologies in a way that we haven't done before. And at Webit.Festival Europe 2018 he announced that he and Mr. Martin Dockweiler are launching the first digital hospital in South America. The hospital will be called SAMD (Shafi Ahmed Martin Dockweiler) University Hospital. It will have a center of innovation, research, teaching. They will be testing new technologies.

The future is not today or tomorrow. It's happening all around us as we speak. And that is the future we create for ourselves.  

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Missed the 2018 edition of Webit.Festival Europe? Don’t miss the 2019! Get your super early bird 2in1 tickets – 2 for the price of 1 here!

"The future is very important, because we will kind of spend the rest of our lives there. So we better make it really good. :)"

Martin Wezowski is the Chief Designer & Futurist at SAP. He joined Webit to put some perspective on “what is work and what is human in a superhuman future”.

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Martin, being a fan of the Beatles, started with playing a tune that resembles the style of the iconic band. But later he revealed that the song was created by AI that mimics the Beatles.

"It listens to everything that The Beatles have ever done and makes new songs. It does it so successfully that it has over 2M views on Youtube. That should really raise deep and profound questions."

The main question is WTF - What’s the future?

One example of that is the healthcare.

"It takes 7-10 years to make a doctor, which gives us a severe shortage of doctors."

With the soon-future-AI, medical help will be in infinite amount everywhere, all the time for everyone. That should also change our minds about what is human work. Nowadays AI can diagnose heart diseases or lung diseases more accurately than humans. Funny enough, humans and AI combined are almost 100% correct. In the 90s we decoded the human genome. It took billions of dollars. Now there is a DNA sequencer for 1000$. What does this mean for research? What does it mean for animal testing?

The NOW has never been so temporary as it is today.

Maybe we should start imagining the futures that we want and start creating them, rather than react to what we where we are today because thus we are too late. That might be a little scary because we see jobs disappearing. A hundred years ago almost everybody worked at farming, fishing, forestry. Now it's only about 2%. What did they do? What would they think if you'd tell them: "Most of you will not be in agriculture." What would hey imagine that they will do, accounting? Web development? We are in the same situation today. And it doesn't matter because we will imagine new jobs as they emerge. We can't plan for it. And the real question is this:

What to teach kids to become relevant in 30 years from now?

How can we adapt to the change? What new values do we need? The stability of planning is a little bit of fake. The opposite to stability is not instability, it's emergence. It's risk, it's rock'n'roll. To transform, to challenge and take risks. Innovation is sort of rock'n'roll in business and we need more of that.

One thing we rely on is the thinking of the 3 horizons.

1. Continuous innovation - Ready to consume: Traditional KPIs (key performance indicators) of predictable outcomes and repeatable results and scalable efficiency.
2. Adjacent innovation - Ready to Co-innovate: Forecasting your intelligence and resources to the near future, the next, the adjacent innovation where you co-innovate with your partners and/or customers.
3. Transformative Innovation - Ready to Inspire: Thinking away from what you can do today and the tools you have. Your vision and thought leadership leads to ideas that you must articulate very clearly so you can have a decent discussion on executive and board level about these ideas.

 

Help the world run better and improve people's lives.

These two things go to the two sides of the spectrum with 4 dimensions:

1. The self running company

For example: Counting logotypes in commercials for example is not a human work anymore. Machines do that now. And it changes the whole business model for the industry. Now they pay for what they get.

2. Self organizing Business Ecosystems

They are built on the philosophy that the current power is a like money - the more you hold, the more powerful you are. The more relevant you make yourself in the distribution of that power - the more powerful you will be.

3. Augmented humans

The Super Human - that we all carry inside. By removing the constraints of the human bias and knowledge we can be beyond that and be super human or human at last. That answers the question: What is the smartest app? Well that's the one that makes YOU smarter.

4. Purpose Led New Market & Business Models

Why are you relevant 10 years from now? It doesn't have to be to save the planet, you have dreams and focus and markets, you would like to create. Something that excites you to the moon. Articulate that very well - why are you relevant 10 years from now - because if you don't, you might not be.

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“Everything from the beginning is an open end and it's up yo us to actually sit down and actually use this methods and look across all the 3 horizons, articulate futures that are desirable where we can play a significant positive role. That's our purpose. And if we do that I actually think we can design futures that we all want to live in. And we should remember to have some fun as well. :)”

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Missed the 2018 edition of Webit.Festival Europe? Don’t miss the 2019! Get your super early bird 2in1 tickets – 2 for the price of 1 here!  

Robert C. Wolcott is a long time friend of Webit.Festival. He is a Clinical professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and Managing Partner at Clareo.

The human experience will change more in the next century than it has in the last ten millennia: Where is the discussion to accompany that change?

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Mr. Wolcott returned to Sofia once again for the 10th anniversary edition of the Festival and wowed the audience with his keynote with special topic "Innovating your life". He started with a quote from the one and only Steve Jobs:

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"Innovation distinguishes the leaders from the followers."

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If your aspiration is to be a leader, to make mark, to create a legacy in some way than it's going to require doing something different. If you don't you're doing the same thing that everybody else already did. And how would that distinguish you? In Robert's opinion over the next 100 years the human experience will change more than it has in the past 10 000! We will be able to solve challenges that have been intractable for centuries but we will also create threads, some of which humanity has never seen before. But unfortunately our public dialog just isn't up to the task. On the one hand we hear ''The robots will steal our jobs and then kill us all in some kind of impending robot apocalypse". But on the other some people are espousing a coming technology infused nirvana. Clearly the truth is somewhere in the vast between and it's our responsibility to explore it for ourselves. The professor broke down the immense and complicated process of "innovating our life" in 5 simple steps:

1. Always keep the mission in mind. What are you doing and how are you doing it?

When we stay focused on our dreams and give them new names like GOALS of MISSIONS they automatically become more realistic and more achievable.

2. Ask better questions. We only see the things which we are looking for.

We start asking questions, we start looking for new things, for new clues. Clues that will help us get to the next step, but some of them will inevitably mislead us and we will make mistakes. Then comes the next lesson.

3. Seek wisdom in mistakes. The very first reaction when something goes wrong is that we are trying to hide it.

The problem is when something doesn't go the way you expect it perhaps there's a problem with the way you see the world. Back in the late 19th century two researchers named Michelson and Morley did one of the most famous failed experiment in history. They were attempting to prove the existence of the "luminiferous aether". It was the dominant hypothesis of physics in the 19th century to explain the following phenomenon.

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Sound cannot travel through a vacuum because there's nothing for sound to travel through. Light however, can travel through a vacuum thus there must be something in the vacuum we cannot see.

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The scientists did their experiment and when it failed, they couldn't figure out why. They changed the method, tried again, then other scientists tried again but it kept failing and nobody could figure out why. Then came Einstein who said: "Perhaps there's no problem with the experiment, perhaps there's a problem with the way we see the Universe." So when something doesn't go the way you expect it, you should step back and do an after action review: Why that did not work? What can we learn from it?

4. Create option paths. Yes, options come at a cost, but create some.

"As we each create our own paths, we together create the future." - says Mr. Wolcott - and he also adds the question to the public - "On which paths are you … and why?"

5. Above all seek meaning. Human beings grow through challenges.

The question for each of us is, as lifespans increase up to even beyond a 100 years, as we encounter the remainder of 21st century, we will all be faced with the question: how should we use this time?"

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Missed the 2018 edition of Webit.Festival Europe? Don’t miss the 2019! Get your super early bird 2in1 tickets – 2 for the price of 1 here!

 

10'000 people from 111 countries visited the Webit City

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Don't miss the 2019 edition. Book your ticket now

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Webit.Festival Europe 2018 in numbers:

- 10'000+ ATTENDEES (7200 Webit.Festival participants and 3000 Webit.X visitors) - 231 EXHIBITORS - 422 SPEAKERS - 110 HOURS of conference agenda & amazing content - 75% C-level (executive) ATTENDANCE - 111 VISITING COUNTRIES - 150 of THE BEST EUROPEAN STARTUPS AND SCALEUPS - 1000+ POLICY MAKERS The European Tech, Digital Economy and Policy event for 2018 was a huge success! The Innovate! Summit and the Plenary Session, chaired by the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda and Society Mariya Gabriel, hosted some of the worlds digital, tech and policy leaders gathered to re:Invent Europe's Future.        

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The Webit City has welcomed 10'000 global leaders and they all requested a residency :)

Here are just 5 quotes out of over 1000 interviews with the Webit City residents: "Unparalleled global business and policy networking at its highest level!" "The most amazing business event with a festival experience" "We basically do business here" "This is the only event where top EU policy makers and global business leaders exchange thoughts and share valuable discussions" “We got more investors visiting our expo booth compared to any other event we have been to”                            

 

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200+ exhibitors at over 20'000 sq.m Webit City expo & business networking area

From global tech, health, fintech, cybersecurity, mobility, blockchain, entertainment, AI, cloud leaders to smart jet fighters - they all were at Webit.Festival Europe 2018 represented by their global or EMEA HQs. Also hosted national pavilions.                                    

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12 independent summits and over 50 meetups

421 speakers have created over 110 hours  of conference agenda & amazing content within 12 independent summits.                                               Founders Games winner of 200'000 EUR cheque is BIOO from Portugal.                   Cities 4.0 Summit, Digital Entertainment and Media Summit, Money Summit and Blockchain Summit

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Webit Night Urban Summit

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                  The Global Webit Awards Ceremony and The Chairman' Dinner by Dr. Russev

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                  The World Famous Webit Party, powered by Playboy, Fashion TV and Dorcel

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                Webit.X - gathering and inspiring 3000 young future leaders

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Missed the 2018 edition? Don’t miss the 2019! Book your ticket now at super earlybird rate

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More global leaders join Webit.Festival Europe 2018!

With over 75% senior attendance among the 6000 people audience from 110 countries - the speakers can only be global leaders and shapers! Join Webit.Festival Europe to meet with them, including Mr. Liang Hua, the newly elected Chairman of Huawei - the world-leading telecommunications provider, just over $90 billion in global annual sales in 2017, Huawei is also the world’s third largest smartphone seller.

STILL NOT TOO LATE!

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Join the Festival and explore unparalleled business networking

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A warm welcome to Thibaut Gregoire, General Counsel, Europe, MasterCard, who joins along with his colleagues - both Vice-Presidents - Mikael Svensson and Louise Holden after the President of Mastercard Europe Javier Perez already joined Webit. Presenting you some of the newly announced speakers of the upcoming Europe's tech, digital economy and policy event for 2018 - Webit.Festival! The Blockchain world joins Webit to challenge the future of the decentralized economy! Webit.Festival is the place to involve policy makers, all major tech companies and the blockchain ecosystem to innovate through collaboration! With over 200 exhibitors and sponsors the 10th Webit.Festival is the largest ever European edition, double in size compared to last year. A warm welcome to Huawei, Red Bull, Google, Amatas, Cogni, Jelurida among the newly joined sponsors and exhibitors of Webit.Fetsival 2018.

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Interested in exhibiting / sponsoring? Contact us asap!

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See you on 26-27 June in Sofia! The Webit Team