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Web Summit 2014 Day One Review

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Web Summit, one of the largest technology conferences in Europe opened up today. Famous people from the technology and business world are expected to talk, like Peter Thiel, Drew Houston and Anna Patterson. This year’s Web Summit started today with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Paddy Cosgrave ringing the bell at NASDAQ’s opening.

Oculus VR CEO announced that a consumer version of the Rift headset is expected in the next months. As vague as that sounds, it appears to be a progress for the company that got acquired by Facebook in March, just two years after the initial kickstarter campaign. Dropbox announced a new partnership with Microsoft in an effort to bring Office files closer to Dropbox users. Evernote announced that a new pricing structure will take place starting from early next year. The company currently offers a free version and a $5 per month paid version of the product but this pricing decision back in 2007 was basically picked at random.

Love and Robots, a 3D printing company that specializes in personalizing, tweaking and editing products to customers’ liking won the ESB spark of genius award. Love and Robots CEO, Emer O’Daly argued that using selective laser sintering technology is positioning them in a good position against the big brands in the field like cafepress and zazzle.

And as for Rugby fans, Guy Easterby from Leinster described how they use GPS data and player self assessment to improve their strategies. Even though he views data analysis used in rugby as lagging behind compared to other sports, he claims that he is putting emphasis on analyzing these numbers in a sense that they can give better results, faster.

Of course, as with several events of this size, there were problems with network connection. Not anticipated for an event about the web, this was criticized by attendees throughout the day. Most importantly, this caused web summit’s founder Paddy Cosgrave anger who pointed the blame to RDS for not allowing third parties running the wifi operation. Not even allowing Vodafone to supply for better 4G coverage of the area. The situation improved throughout the day but connection was still shaky till late in the afternoon. Guinness beer is rumored to be responding with some real time advertising to the situation but the tweets have been since deleted.

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