Tag: IoE

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!

Hristo Hristov is the CEO of NetInfo and Official Representative and Chairman of IAB. He joined Webit.Festival Europe 2018 to share some insights on the future of Blockchain in digital media and advertising.

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The crypto market exploded over the last three years. A lot of industries started looking at blockchain as a technology, as to whether it can solve some of their biggest challenges.

Let's look at blockchain:

Blockchain as a technology is still at its infancy. We're still at the hype cycle and blockchain is sitting right next to autonomous vehicles which I don't see happening in the next two or three years and Event-triggered marketing. So as a technology, blockchain might grow into something big like the internet or even bigger, but it might also fade away into some narrow use cases.

How can Blockchain improve the Digital Media and advertising landscape?

There are some use cases which are rather obvious:  * Fraud detection and prevention  * User Identity  * Buying and selling inventory, etc

Centralization vs. Decentralization

Trust a third party or to use a decentralized approach?

Decentralization PROs

* Durability, reliability and longevity - Due to the decentralized networks, blockchain does not have a central point of failure and is better able to withstand malicious attacks. * Process integrity - Users can trust that transactions will be executed exactly as the protocol commands removing the need for a trusted third party. * High quality data - Blockchain data is complete, consistent, timely, accurate and widely available. * Transparency and immutability - Changes to public blockchain are publicly viewable by all parties creating transparency. All transactions are immutable, which means they cannot be altered or deleted.

Decentralization CONs

* Trusted 3rd parties - it's not Central vs Decentralized. The advertising ecosystem is based on trusted third parties. These 3rd parties are innovation drivers. * It's too slow - Digital advertising is real-time. RTB standard requires service response in 100ms.

There are several examples which already use blockchain in addressing some of digital advertising's biggest challenges.

adChain tries to create a token curated registry of publishers in order to verify and simplify the buying. And papyrus is a decentralized programmatic value management platform aimed to radically improve programmatic advertising stack. All of these solutions are in the making, they are not really ready but they are evolving pretty fast. Several years ago we were talking about mobile apps, then AI, now blockchain. The hype cycles of few years ago were longer and we used to have more time to adapt to them. But now they are becoming shorter and they’re starting to overlap. It wasn’t long long ago that we were talking about programmatic buying. Now it is programmatic buying on a decentralized exchange powered by blockchain.

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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!  

 

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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Only today (29 May) you can join Europe's tech and digital policy event for 2018 and have access to 10+ independent summits and 50+ meetups with 1 ticket at half price! 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.Festival Europe 2018 only today - 29 May.

Register here and get your ticket

to join Prime Ministers, EU Commissioners and EU top policy makers, global innovators and enterprise executives, Ministers,  Mayors, investors, media and Europe's top 200 startups and scaleups - all at Webit.Festival Europe with a special discount of 50% on all tickets with code: GDPR 6000 global experts (67% senior attendance) join Webit from 110 countries.

Check who is speaking

Over 200 exhibitors and sponsors join Webit this year. A warm welcome to the group of new partners who join Webit including Microsoft, SAP, Samsung, Fox, Novartis, VISA, UBB, part of KBC Group, Superhosting . BG, VMware, FOX, Turner, Novartis, Bayer, Amgen, Generali to name a few. Special thanks to our General partner MasterCard and our strategic media partners Nova TV and NetInfo.

Happy to help.

Should you want to join as exhibitor and sponsor -  please contact us.  

Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival Europe 2018, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event. Removing the fiction from science-fiction, the UK-based inventor has thrown away the rule book with his suit powered by six small jet engines. Founder of human propulsion technology start-up, www.Gravity.co, Richard (The real-life Iron Man) has pioneered his innovative idea into a reality, taking flight in Spring 2017.

“The dream was to re-imagine an entirely new authentic form of human flight leaning on an elegant collaboration of mind and body augmented by leading edge technology. Gravity has to date been experienced by over a billion people globally with video views alone running at more than 60M within 7 days of launch.”

Richard's vision is to build Gravity into a world class aeronautical engineering business, challenge perceived boundaries in human aviation, and inspire a generation to dare ask ‘what if…’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JinhIHIF8Eo

“The way you have to balance is pretty much the same stance Tony Stark has in the film,” Browning says.

Richard also broke the record for fastest speed in body-controlled jet suit – he reached 32.02 mph and made his mark in the pages of Guinness World Records. He hopes that in the future he will smash it again.

“As the engine starts pulling up, it starts to build you can sense the energy and the moment the ground leaves your feet and you’re actually in the air it’s a pleasure and joy.”

Browning says that this is just the beginning of this technology journey. The next big thing his company is planning is adding wings to the suit, that will allow the person wearing it, to fly further, faster and higher and also use a lot less fuel than now.  

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.  

Visa is not the first credit card!

Maybe it’s no news for you, but for the majority of the audience of  the Red Stage at Webit Festival, it certainly was. The one who made that revelation is the General Manager of Visa for Israel, Mr. Oded Salomy. He had a keynote at last year’s edition on enabling the transforming world of payments. Visa is one of the names that probably need no introduction. “Visa” has become a nickname for our payment cards. So much, that people tend to there’s much more behind it than just a plastic for payments. Payments is such a vast area that it’s quite unpredictable what the future will bring. We never know what’s going to impact payments and the booming fintech industry. Everyday payments, business to business payments, business to customer payments and reverse.. Machines paying other machines rather than humans, biometrics being used in order to identify people by their biological characteristics.. All the way up to crypto currencies and tokens. New services, easier to work with and keeping a proper security level are needed by this ever evolving system. Numerous startups have been trying to be the next “big thing” that will shake the world of payments as the price of Bitcoin did some time ago.

In the Internet of Things space things have been connecting to Fintech too

Wearables such as rings, bracelets, wrist-watches and keychains are becoming more than just accessories - there are already ones out in sale that can allow us to pay on the move. Another category that’s being impacted is the connected cars. With just an Internet connection we can pay for grocery, for gas, parking, insurance while going to work or some more  without the need to get out of the vehicle. And last but not least, check the Webit.Festival website for upcoming speakers and our ticket options.

Apply for our Founders Games and get the chance of being among the 200 startups presenting their innovative idea in front of investors, business leaders and all attendees of Webit.Festival 2018. Corporates & startups. Two forces of the business world which are as much different as they need each other. Brian Collins (AngelHack), Jonas Jacobi (IBM) & Matthias Schanze (Siemens) put some light on this complex relationship Mr. Schanze described as”Dancing with an elephant”

The open API (Application Programming Interfaces) revolution took of 5 years ago

A familiar example of APIs in action is the ability to sign into different accounts or services with our Facebook login. We can log into Pinterest, for example, by using our Facebook login credentials. That revolution was built on the idea that corporates could start opening up their technology for developers & startups. By doing so they were able to find a whole new strategy. In that way, the strategy shifted. It shifted from a B2B or a B2C focus to a Business to Developer focus. As such, innovation programming quickly went on the rise. Corporates began looking at developers and startups as a whole new strategy to their strategic plans and in doing so they’ve started working and finding ways to engage with startups & developers at an earlier and earlier stage.

Why the relationship between startups & corporates is important

Big companies have more than enough funds to put in place and do their own research. What these companies have noted is that a lot of innovation occurs outside the company itself. That’s one of the main reasons companies like IBM, Siemens and others of this size have been involved in the startup ecosystem for quite some time already. Startups do set trends and it’s important for large corporations to always keep an eye on new trends and new technologies that are emerging fast. So what are these companies looking for? Big ideas. Great technologies. And innovations. Innovations that disrupt industries and possibly create new markets. Transformation, not only for the company itself but for its clients as well.

Value proposition to the corporates

Corporates are well aware that they cannot invent everything by themselves. Co-creation and co-innovation with startups is a key point of their development. The transition is turning from internal Research & Development departments inside of corporates towards creating an external community, a liquid R&D force in essence. There’s the notion that most big corporates engage with, acquire or invest their funds in startups that already make some millions of revenue but in reality that is not the case anymore. The practice of an early engagement has grown immensely and that calls for more fair chances for more startups.