Tag: webit congress

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!

This is the message that Webit’s Executive Chairman and Goodwill Ambassador for Bulgaria's Digital Affairs - Plamen Russev sent to the world from Davos and shared upon his landing at Sofia Airport. He shared his impressions from the past week at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This year Dr. Russev hosted a special forum and reception - Webit.Davos 2019.

Apple's Chief Executive Officer among Webit.Davos 2019 guests

More than 300 guests from the world elite accepted Dr. Russev's personal invitation, including Apple's CEO Tim Cook, the President of Harvard University - Larry Beikou, presidents and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and many other government and NGOs representatives, as well as media, among which CNN, Forbes, and others. Such elite of global leaders are seldom brought together. The forum took place in the area with the highest level of security at the Davos Forum in Hilton Garden.

“There are dozens of events happening in Davos every minute, and the competition for the attention of the world leaders is extremely high. It was an exceptional honor for me that over 300 global leaders were with us and respected us with their presence. This is also a signal to others about Webit's influence and next year we expect even more interest.“ - said Webit’s Executive Chairman Plamen Russev.

The development of artificial intelligence, the future of work and blockchain technologies were among the main topics of the event. As a Goodwill Ambassador for the Digital Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria, Dr. Russev introduced his high-profile guests to the exceptional opportunities Bulgaria provides as a hub for new technologies. Webit affirmed Sofia as a digital capital in the global media and continues to promote the city and Bulgaria as a place for innovation and opportunities for opening development centers and creation of new high tech jobs.

"Mercedes Benz creates its entire platform for autonomous cars based on artificial intelligence in Sofia. 1300 Bulgarians will write such a platform, again based on artificial intelligence, for another world giant - Bosch. After attending two consecutive editions of Webit.Festival, the creator of the world's most used database - MySQL, chose to invest in a local company that is working on his new, extraordinary project ... I can give dozens of other examples. Bulgaria is becoming a local technology superpower and that is completely in unison with the long-standing efforts of Webit and our partners to improve people's lives by developing entrepreneurship and increasing the influence of women in business and politics. For the last 11 years, Webit builds and affirms the image of our country through our global community of over 800 000 people, who receive Webit news and are part of our global family. " Dr. Russev continued.

"Although the tone of the discussions in Davos was a bit pessimistic, I am moderately optimistic about Bulgaria and the creative role of our country in the region. The main challenges are to work together and for the common good; education is a key factor and much has to be done in this area. Webit Foundation has already gathered over 3000 young people - the color of the nation and enlighten them about the future. We have many plans and a lot of work to do together in that direction!"

Plamen Russev has also hinted at another big update, which is to be officially announced soon. From his words, 26 European cities are currently bidding to host Webit.Festival 2020. Which are the cities, what are their proposals to Webit, and whether Sofia will remain on Webit’s world map, are questions yet to be answered.

Andy Tsao (Managing Director Global Gateway at Silicon Valley Bank) took us on a journey through some of the emerging markets where he had the opportunity to spend time and build the case for innovation economy. He calls it Adventure Capital.

United States vs Emerging markets

What's happening in US in terms of tech and innovation investing?

The US market has been on a 8-year up-cycle. In 2017, 82,9 M USD were invested and for historical context that is the most amount of Venture invested since the year 2000. But then again by looking at the first quarter of 2018 (28.2B USD) if we do a simple annualization - we may be on a course to exceed a 100B USD venture invested in US this year and perhaps we may eclipse the 105B USD from 2000.

"The US economy is doing well, the stock markets are at all time high, unemployment is at historical low, why are then our investors and entrepreneurs increasingly looking outside the US in emerging markets in terms of creating valuable technology companies?"

If we look at the global set of unicorns - more than half of them reside outside of the US while just 5 years ago nearly 75% of all global venture was invested in Silicon Valley.

Global innovation wave is growing.

➡️ 49% of Global unicorns are outside of US (CB insights) ➡️ 57% of new unicorns are outside US ➡️ China has 55 unicorns, Idia - 9 ➡️ 40% of YC is international ➡️ Less than 45% of global VC is in Silicon Valley Last year, venture commitments in China exceeded $50B for the first time, funded largely by domestic RMB investors. Venture fundraising in china matched US fundraising in 2016, which was the highest total in 15 years. By some measures China is already the largest Venture market in the world. Certainly China is the second largest economy in the world. India is also a good example of "tropicalization" meaning that entrepreneurs and investors can choose business models from developed markets apply innovation to take those models locally to their home market. Flipkart is a good example of that. The company raised billions of dollars and have been competing vigorously with Amazon in India for the e-commerce market.

"As I travel around the emerging markets, one of the sectors that really pops out is Fintech."

It seems like in many of the emerging markets the banking landscape is very similar - usually dominated by a handful of large powerful banks that act in a monopolistic sort of manner. That means they don't take a lot of risk, they don't treat their customers very well and as a result it gives the entrepreneurs the opportunity to really disrupt, innovate.

Secular trends that drive the acceleration of innovation in emerging markets:

➡️ The amount of capital that you need to launch a business today has drastically reduced from a few years ago. ➡️ Entrepreneurs can leverage cloud based technologies using lean startup models, they can get to Proof of concept much quicker than before with much less money. ➡️ Entrepreneurs don't need to go to the large money centers like the Silicon Valley ➡️ Increasing availability for best practices - Endeavor, Techstarts, YC ➡️ Proactive government funding ➡️ More funding available from US and other developed markets ➡️ Rise of the rest - you'd no longer have to be at one of the traditional US tech hubs to launch a relevant high growth technology business.

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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!