06 November 2014
This year’s Web Summit in Dublin was larger in scale than previous events, with over 20,000 participants reported by the organisers. With a number of new streams in different thematic areas, there was certainly something for almost anyone. Admittedly some of these new summits were much shorter in duration than other more longstanding stream.
The primary challenge of this event is balancing the interests of participants with those who are presenting and/or sponsoring the event. While many of the presentations were of interest both to entrepreneurs and the general public with an interest in keeping up to date with technology, the quality of interventions depending to a considerable degree on the individual presenters and the moderator of that intervention. Each time slot was focused on one or two presenters, typically with a moderator from the world of blogging, journalism or television.
Paul Cunningham, FI-IMPACT, raised awareness of FIWARE and the grant funding currently available from the 16 Phase 3 Accelerators over the 3 days. There were a significant number of exhibitors across the different RDS venues used for the Summity. While there was limited previous awareness of FIWARE or FI-PPP Phase 3, the exhibitors and delegates were interested in looking at this further.