Tag: Webit.Festival Europe
How to invest in people and build the foundations of future...
In times of drastic social and economic changes, like the ones we live in, knowledge about the future can be a crucial factor for building it the right way. As Malcolm X once said - Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today!
The massive potential of technological advancements in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Quantum Computing, Automation and Robotics should make us think how we need to educate our kids and develop their skill sets for the demand of the future.
The AI and Automation will surely make many manual, repetitive jobs obsolete. But as any tech advancements in the past, the ones that are before us will certainly create many occupations that we can hardly even dream of.
According to the Founder of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, if we keep the 200 years old knowledge-based approach our children will never be able to compete with machines. Instead, kids should be taught soft skills like independent thinking and team work.
Of course, changing the education system will require a lot of money. In 2017, the edtech (education technology) investments in the US surpassed a record high of $9.5 billion. Forecasts show that the AI in education market is set to go past $6 billion by 2024.
The topic of education, among many others, will be discussed during the Innovate! & Plenary Session of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe - the largest event for innovations and entrepreneurship in this part of the world.
Many experts, such as the Director of the London School of Economics, Minouche Shafik, believe that changing our education system will be an essential part of the process of fixing the fractures in our societies and avoiding a tilt towards populism.
She thinks that more and more people realize that the system of today will not work in their benefit, so they are looking to vote for anti-system players, such as Donald Trump for example. Of course, this does not mean that the populists will rule Europe and the world, but it is a strong sing for the establishment to start the process of changing itself to meet the demand of tomorrow.
In a relatively near future technology will allow us to learn anything almost instantly. Our brains will be boosted with special implants that will help us memorize information - an advancement that will improve our lives dramatically.
Just imagine a time when you don’t need to spend 16 years in different forms of educational institutions, so that you can get a degree. Such implants will help us personalize the education we get and learn the most suitable information for our skills. With the implants of tomorrow, we will basically have a search engine in our heads and we will be able to get all information that is online on demand, instead of knowing it.
Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the major steps that world’s policy makers and corporate leaders will need to take to create the infrastructure of tomorrow and protect us from the threats that will come with it.
During Innovate! & Plenary Session you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Serial Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke, the Senior Parther at McKinsey & Co Paul Willmott, The VP of Amazon Web Services Sandy Carter and VP of Amazon Paul Misener, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel, the Deputy Director-General of World Trade Organization Yonov Frederick Agah and many others.
Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.
What steps we need to take to secure the future of...
We are all living in a time of exponential change both in our societies and economics. The new industrial revolution and the rise of robots and automation will change dramatically the way we live, communicate and entertain ourselves. But probably the most crucial change will come in our workplace, where we will need a completely new set of skills to stay competitive.
According to the annual Future of Jobs Report, issued by the WEF, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be consist of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today.
Soon we will all need to make a serious effort to develop our soft skills, such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and the ability to teach others. Experts think that there will be a higher demand for such abilities, than the narrow technical skills.
This, among many other topics, will be discussed during the Innovate! & Plenary Session of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe - the largest event for innovations and entrepreneurship in this part of the world.
Students today think that getting a four-year university degree is the only way to become part of a global company such as Google, Apple or Amazon. But business leaders like the CEO of Siemens USA Barbara Humpton and her colleague in Apple Tim Cook are already questioning this old-fashioned career path.
Recently Cook pointed out that the US employment at Apple includes a lot of people who did not have degrees. And the main reason for that is the fact that most of the colleges do not teach the skills business leaders need, such as coding for example.
According to a LinkedIn report, prominent companies do not require that employees have college degrees. The data analysis of the social network identified, tha positions like electronic technicians, mechanical designers and marketing representatives are offered to people with no education but having the required skill set.
The main drivers of this exponential changes in our work requirements are four processes: high-speed mobile internet, Artificial Intelligence, adoption of Big Data analytics and Cloud Technology.
If we want to prevent a catastrophic processes in the society like mass unemployment, business and educational leaders will have to take an active role and help the workers today with re-skilling and up-skilling.
While this process will unfold on a global scale, it will also be a major challenge for the new European Commission that will be appointed after the elections for Members of the European Parliament at the end of May. The new governing body will need to develop a continent-wide strategy for developing its human resource, in order for the continent to stay competitive with new global powers, such as China, who have a more centralized authority.
Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the major steps that European policy makers and corporate leaders will need to take to create a secure job market for us and for the generations to come.
During Innovate! & Plenary Session you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Serial Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke, the Senior Parther at McKinsey & Co Paul Willmott, The VP of Amazon Web Services Sandy Carter and VP of Amazon Paul Misener, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel, the Deputy Director-General of World Trade Organization Yonov Frederick Agah and many others.
Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.
Join the Founders Games – World’s Biggest Startup Challenge during Europe’s...
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
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! |
For Innovate, press 5
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.
Тake advantage of the special Early bird prices and book your ticket for Webit.Festival Europe 2019 for as low as 100 EUR!
Webit.Festival Europe is launching a new summit: Climate|Tech
Webit.Festival Europe is launching a new summit, topics of which have been discussed over the years. The mission of the Summit is to address climate change by uniting Technology Innovators, Academia, Governments in taking action towards a low-carbon world.
Government representatives shall discuss their efforts and good practices in intense activity in climate policy and an indicator on the countries’ ambitions to reduce emissions and support climate protection. Innovation through legislation is a driving force for Webit.Foundation.
Despite the numerous statistics on climate change, we somehow remain blind folded and rarely take action to preserve the nature and follow expert’s advice.
By 2050, 2/3 of the global population will live in cities.
Аnd more than 70% of the global demand for infrastructure over the next 15 years is expected to be in urban areas. This predisposition will determine our economic future and climate security for the years ahead. How cities develop is important both for growth and for climate change. It is up to us to take action and make change today. According to a WEF survey, dirty air can prematurely kill 400,000 Europeans, not to mention the health costs and the new diseases like allergies in the recent years. The Climate|Tech Summit is Webit.Festival Europe's high-level gathering with a special focus on climate change, its consequences and how investors can change the status quo.Webit.Foundation has dedicated its work to help solve global problems
It is our belief technology can greatly contribute. Thus, it is our mission to develop technology and digital ecosystems wherever we step foot in. The current state of technology is providing so many solutions that can be put into action. Our goal is to gather the enterprise leaders in the different industries together and plan how to transfer from the current Energy system to a new - clean tech world. Furthermore, we are investing in solutions to these world problems. Founder’s games’ 2018 winner, Bioo, developing a product in renewable energies, generating the greenest energy on Earth won €200 000.Do you have a revolutionary idea to preserve the environment? >> Apply to Founders games here. <<
The DApps Era is coming – the future of Blockchain adoption
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.
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 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.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!
Will the blockchain industry change digital advertising?
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.
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.
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 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, etcCentralization 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.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!
Martin Wezowski talks about “WTF – What’s the future” @Webit.Festival 2018
"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”.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.
- Continuous innovation - Ready to consume: Traditional KPIs (key performance indicators) of predictable outcomes and repeatable results and scalable efficiency.
- 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.
- 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:- The self running company
- Self organizing Business Ecosystems
- Augmented humans
- Purpose Led New Market & Business Models
“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. :)”
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!
Chairman of Huawei joins Webit.Festival 2018!
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!
Join the Festival and explore unparalleled business networking
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.
Interested in exhibiting / sponsoring? Contact us asap!
See you on 26-27 June in Sofia! The Webit Team