Day Two #WebSummit Reflections

So that’s it for this year; the Dublin Web Summit has now closed. I had a great time at the RDS today and was busy networking, observing and learning.

The highlights for me were Victoria Ransom, Founder and CEO of Wildfire being interviewed by The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Rooney. It was brilliant hearing the incredible and almost accidental story of Wildfire, the challenges of managing growth and what their plans for the future are. It’s a very inspiring tale and Ben Rooney deserves praise for his interviewing style too.

As an avid user of Podio it was interesting hearing what its co-founder Kasper Hulthin had to say about online collaboration and the social aspect of Podio. Social business is something of a buzzword, but tools like Podio are helping businesses communicate better and become more efficient.

J.P Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce is someone I respect hugely and with a break from tradition he decided not to speak about the technical aspects of cloud; instead he focussed on trust being the factor most crucial to the success of the cloud. Whilst, Jan Rezab, CEO of Social Bakers gave a thought-provoking talk about social analytics and definitely sparked a few ideas.

I don’t normally like sales pitches masquerading as talks, but Kathryn Parsons did a fantastic job of explaining ‘Code in a Day’ and it’s something I’ll be looking at more closely. In terms of the start-ups which caught my eye, Tictail sounds very exciting – and looks like a fantastic online store solution.

My other takeaways from today are:

• Scale was mentioned throughout the day with particular reference to the importance of being able to scale-up and do it quickly. Small businesses looking for VC investment must have scale thoroughly planned out.
• Talk of disruption was extremely prevalent too. Virtually all of the successful start-ups see a broken model and want to turn the status quo on its head. Many of them have lofty missions and it was awe-inspiring to see such ambition, determination and thinking.
• There was a big focus on social media tools and platforms, but I would have liked to have seen some talks on analytics.
• Digital marketers selling their wares is boring.

All in all, I’ve had a great two days and enjoyed the stellar line-up. Paddy and the team have done very well and should be congratulated on their efforts.