Tag: tech

Despite fears of Brexit disruption, 2016 was really a roller coaster year for European startups. According to French investment advisors Clipperton, EU startups have collected $12 billion of investments for the year, which is comparable to the record levels of 2015 for investment on the continent. It is still too soon to measure the impact of Britain’s decision on the startup market, but the dynamics of the two-year process of leaving the EU will have to be monitored closely. Experts believe that this year there will be several main engines for startup development in the tech sector. During 2016, big corporations invested lots of money in better predictions with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In 2017 we can expect a lot smaller companies to take part in the AI revolution. Part of this is due to the fact that many universities started classes to educate students about the possibilities of this exciting new tech. Gartner already identified AI and machine learning as one of the top 10 strategic tech trends, that expands the spectrum of implementations to physical devices, apps and services. With the development of AI there is a lot of room for growth for startups, that specialize in chatbots. Business will look for bots more often than ever to help reduce its spending on customer service. Chatbots will be hot in the years to come, just because there are great way for corporate optimization. More than 85 percent of customer interactions will not include a human being by 2020, and chatbots will be the No. 1 consumer application of AI during the next five years. Another generator of startups is the cybersecurity sector. Insiders say that after every hackaton in the developed world, a new cybersecurity startup pops up to address the problem. This field is full of opportunities for new companies to step in, and we all expect the number of threats online to continue to rise. According to a report by Frost and Sullivan the implementation of blockchain technology can put an end to cyber attack. Until now many thought that blockchain has only the potential to fuel innovation in FinTech sector. European startups are really on the rise with the help of many accelerators and events like Webit.Festival Europe. During this year’s Founders Games an international board and jury of investors and enterprise leaders are selecting semi finalists from over 1500 applications. Five of them will get to the finals and one will win a seed investment. Last year the award was €200 000, but this year the organizers hope it will reach €500 000. With over 93% startup failure overall rate, the selected Webit startups for the Founders Games’s semi-finals in the past 7 years have less than 30% failure rate. Being among the Webit's Founders Games startup list is a statement of the company's credibility, innovation and potential in front of enterprise and investors as well as a great marketing opportunity. Webit gives startups access to a community of over 100 000, including some of the most influential people on 5 continents. The festival consists of 12 parallel summits - a fact that gives the unique opportunity for targeted networking with some of the best in the industry.

Artificial Intelligence and Automation are the two biggest threats to the job security in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to a report, released by the Obama administration in the end of the last year, nearly 47% of the jobs in USA are at risk in the next 20 years.

Signs for what is coming are all over the news and even the notorious astrophysicist Stephen Hawking predicted that the increasing automation is going to decimate middle class jobs and worsen the already big inequality and political instability worldwide.

This process has already destroyed some jobs in traditional manufacturing and the development of AI is going to extend this trend to the service sector, when only management and supervisory roles remain safe, at least for now. Of course, the US administration report notes that the new technology will open new career opportunities for those with higher-level skills. But even they will need government-supported re-training programs to help mitigate the negative impact of automation by preparing displaced workers for their new jobs. Last week Japanese insurance company Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance laid off more than 30 employees and replaced them with artificial intelligence system that calculates payouts to policyholders. The firm management believes that this will boost its productivity by about 30% and will return the investment in less that two years. The annual cost savings will amount to about £1m and the cost of the system installation is £1.4m. It is based on the IBM’s Watson Explorer. Late last year the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates announced that it is building software that will automate the daily management of the company and will deal with the hiring and firing of employees and other strategic decisions. The company’s founder Ray Dalio assigned to his software engineers the task to ensure that the firm is managed according to his vision when he is not at work. They have built a tool that incorporate different rating into personal profiles of employees that show their strengths and weaknesses. Another app set goals for them and monitor their implementation. Although there is no unanimous opinion about the exact impact of AI on the labour market and the industry in the coming years we can certainly say that it will be more than great. To understand more about the application of artificial intelligence techniques in products and business you can listen to the leader of IBM Watson Partner Innovations Europe Christoph Auer-Welsbach. He is one of the confirmed speakers in the Tech Summit of Webit.Festival 2017 in Sofia. The expert will also talk about the best practices of high-growth startups on going from tested ide to scalable company. The main topics of his lecture will focus on Machine Intelligence, Cognitive Computing, FinTech, IoT and Smart City. During the Tech Summit you can learn the latest trends in Digital Transformation, IoE, BigData & Cloud, Security & Privacy, FinTech, Money & Payments. So, don’t waste time, these are all the important links you need: To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2017 (EarlyBird expires soon), click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. StartUP? Apply for the Founders Games Challenge by Webit.Foundation and get an opportunity for free festival tickets (500), free exhibition table (100) and opportunity to win 200 000 EUR (only 1), click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For more information on the Global Webit Series and our events in Dubai, Singapore, New Delhi and Istanbul: www.Webit.Org.

Fitness wearable creator Fitbit is in the process of acquiring smartwatch maker Pebble in a deal that will likely spell the end of the Pebble brand. VentureBeat has learned that the sale price will be between $34 million and $40 million. Pebble had some problems recently, but more about the deal here. Meanwhile, real estate startup OpenDoor received huge $210 million Series D investment from Norwest Venture partners. With the new capital, the company wants to expand the usage of its marketplace platform for buying and selling real estate to 10 cities. OpenDoor is unique in that it owns its own inventory of homes, Techcrunch points out. While the predictive analytics the company employs to project home resale value are complicated, the experience for buyers and sellers is fairly streamlined. And let's talk about closing venture funds. Accel India has closed its fifth fund with $450 million, roughly two years after closing its fourth fund with $325 million, read about it here. Singapore’s Jungle Ventures today confirmed the final close of its newest $100 million fund for investments in Southeast Asia. Founder Collective, the seven-year-old, Cambridge, Ma.-based seed-stage venture fund, has closed its third fund with $75 million in capital from a small group of limited partners whose anchor investors are the the firm’s three partners: David Frankel, Micah Rosenbloom and Eric Paley. Three members Genesis Partners are starting a new venture fund. F2 Capital, founded by Eddy Shalev, Jonathan “Jonny” Saacks and Barak Rabinowitz, is in the midst of closing a $50 million debut fund to back seed stage companies. And finally, after raising $300 million from Volkswagen earlier this year, on-demand ride service Gett is getting another tranche of financing. Today the company announced that it has secured a $100 million, seven-year loan facility from Russia’s Sberbank.

Have a look at some of the interesting news from today, regarding the tech and business world. First of all, we should point out the 100 million euro raised by Devialet,  the French developer of high-end speakers and the IP behind the sound systems that make them go boom.  The investment comes from Foxconn, Jay-Z, Rubin's Playground and even more investors. See more about it here. And let's talk about wireless VR, sounds like a fantasy, right? Well, the researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) may have a solution in MoVr, a wireless virtual reality system. Instead of using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to transmit data, the research team’s MoVR system uses high-frequency millimeter wave radio to stream data from a computer to a headset wirelessly at dramatically faster speeds than traditional technology. Learn more about it here. Meanwhile,  one of the hedge fund industry's hottest new funds is betting on Disney. Samantha Greenberg's Margate Capital Management is investing in Walt Disney Company – even as many peers are shedding the stock. If you want to see more about the interesting investment, click here. Proficio, a cybersecurity startup specializing in managed detection and response (MDR) services, has raised $12 million in a round led by Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors. More about it here. About Webit.Festival 2017: Webit.Festival is the European edition of the Webit Series of events, which will take place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from the 25th to the 27th of April, 2017. The festival consists of several parallel conferences and events, workshops, roundtables and exhibitions. The event is under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova and the European Commission. The agenda includes Tech Summit, Marketing and Innovation Summit, Developers Summit and Smart Cities Summit. Separate area of the festival will be dedicated to startups from Bulgaria and other countries in the world. The agenda for the founders includes conference, meetings with investors, academy for startups and special stage for them to pitch their companies in front of a jury of investors, journalists and leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Webit.Festival is the most influential event on the tech and digital industry in the region. To buy your tickets for Webit.Festival 2017, click here. To apply for speaking, click here. To apply for partnership, click here. To apply for exhibiting, click here. To apply for our Founders Games, click here. To see the video gallery from Webit.Festival 2016, click here. To learn more about the events that are part of the festival, click here. To see pictures from our previous events, click here. For all this information and even more, visit our website www.webit.bg. Contact: Aniela Russeva

aniela@webitcongress.com