Dublin Web Summit

The first day of the Dublin Web Summit kicked off yesterday with a couple of interesting presentations.  Dylan Collins from Jolt online games wins for most interesting presentation where he provided some value.  Here is a full summary.

The Dublin Web Summit kicked off Alan Coleman from BriteBill telling us that innovation in a startup is key.  He was the winner for the spark of genius award at the last Web Summit. He won the award based on Getitkeepit.com which is an online bill management system for people but he has since changed direction and is focussing on providing this service as a technology solution to businesses rather than dealing direct with consumers.

There was then 5 speakers who are competing for this event’s spark of genius award as follows:

Moozler.com - This allows you to seamlessly swop incoming phone calls from your mobile to a PC and back and forth.  I missed why this is so great, they say that it can save you money.  Maybe if you’re roaming and get an incoming call you can swop to your PC and then you won’t be paying any roaming charges.  I had a look at their website and they don’t explain it very well so that’s the first thing they need to sort out.

Profitero.com – This service monitors products that you and your competitors are selling online and provides information related to these products to help you improve sales.  For example, if you are selling your product online for 50 euro and your competitor is selling for 75 maybe you can increase your price.

Tripenquiry.com – This is an online management and payment system for booking rental accomodation for your holiday.

Geodealio.com – Mobile location based deals that are on offer.  You’re on Grafton Street and get deals based on places close by.

Datahug.com – They monitor all incoming and outgoing e-mails to a company in order to develop, manage and nurture relationships.  For example, you can work out based on your e-mails how often you communicate with different people in an organisation.  If you communicate on a daily basis then the relationship is stronger.  Maybe you are not communicating enough.

The winner will be announced to-morrow, I think Datahug.com have a good chance of winning.  Their presentation was certainly the best.

Next up was three VC’s.  Their key message is that they are always looking for deals and the people behind the project is the most important part.    The 3 people was Brian Caulfield ( dfjesprit ), Sean Seton-Rogers (Profounders) and Tom Keller (Techstars)

The best and most interesting presentation the night was from Dylan Collins from Jolt online games.  He talked about mistakes that he made that we should avoid.  Here are a few:

• Take time to think – You can’t be too busy to think, go for a walk and you’ll be amazed at what you can do when you get back.
• Be honest to VC’s – When you have got investment and you run into problems be honest with your VC’s.
• Consider the size of the market – Make sure your market is big enough to make the big bucks.
• Shiny doesn’t mean fun – You can spend a lot of money on fancy graphics for games but if they’re not fun people won’t play them.  Farmville doesn’t have fancy graphics but has many millions of users!
• Copy other people but do it better!

We then had Chad Hurley the Founder of Youtube.  He was arts student who started his business above a pizza shop and sold it to Google for over a billion 18 months later.  They tried not to sell it but it was growing so quickly they couldn’t expand quickly enough to keep pace with it.  His talk was really just a chat about his background with nothing particularly exciting to share. During the talk Stephen from Balcony TV asked a question which ended up a 5 minute pitch on his business.  Well, fair play to you Stephen, some great promotion of his cool site.

The founder of lastminute.com Brent Hoberman also came on and talked about his idea he had for his business which was sitting in his drawer for 2 years.

So overall The Web Summit in Dublin was a luke warm start to the event so hopefully things will warm up to-day.  Have I missed anything?

How we run business today and in the future is changing. The recession has had a lot of negative effects but the general feeling in the room was that it will give rise to the birth of new ways of doing business and a whole new set of entrepreneurs. I think people now realise you cannot rely on the corporate market for a safe job, there are no safe jobs any more. If you set up your own business you might be out of money some day but you’ll never be out of work!

There were many accomplished and interesting speakers there that day with great tips and inspiring stories, and I would like to share some of them with you.

Resourceful Entrepreneurs

I thought the following video was very inspirational as it shows you what can be achieved with massive determination and very little resources. Have a look and get inspired today! It’s an amazing story about a man named William Kamkwamba from Africa who decided that he wanted electricity in his home and found a way.

Operating your social business

Daniel Priestly (the organiser) who is an entrepreneur with many businesses talked about how easy and relatively inexpensive it was for new businesses to set up online. He gave examples of building your brand using buildabrand.com, using the power of crowd sourcing to get your web designs completed using 99designs.com, using Facebook and Twitter to promote your business for free, and much more. He talked about the power of social media spreading the word and how small businesses now have the power to go up against the big companies. You don’t need the finance you once required. He also mentioned that Apple, Dell, Microsoft and Virgin were all started by under 25 year olds during a recession!

The Future of Enterprise is Online Networks

One area that was stressed by many presenters was that the future of enterprise was the power of online networks and how organisations are changing as a result of this. Bill Liao discussed how Nintendo were going out of business and decided the best model forward for them was to create peer to peer relationships with their customers and through these relationships online they completely turned around their company. Bill also discussed the importance of trust. Building up trust with your customers online through developing effective meaningful relationships. Also building trust internally with your employees and creating a happy work place which leads to a more productive environment. If you want to read more about trust on the web and the importance of building relationships to be more effective with social media pick up a copy of Trust Agents by Chris Brogan. This is an excellent read and well worth investing in a copy.

Do the Green Thing

Andy Hosbawm, an internet advertising pioneer talked about his company Green Thing. He believes the future of enterprise is green and has set up many initiatives to promote this. One great initiative was related to lost gloves. If you find a lost glove send it in to his office and they will wash it, match it up with another glove (non matching) and sell it on!!! They’ll even put the label ‘left’ on one glove and ‘right’ on another glove so you can tell people that they are actually a pair instead of odd mismatches. Seems a simple initiative but it’s the type of thing that could catch on and a great way of getting the recycling message out there.

Sharing your knowledge

Richard Alderston talked about his move to India to set up UnLtd India to help social entrepreneurs in the worlds fasted growing country. He told us about inspirational stories about people they have helped set up in business including a person with restricted hearing that felt he could help other people with similar issues by setting up a courier company. They now have over 30 people employed and plan on expanding across India.

There were several other really interesting speakers and it really got us thinking about how we can benefit from the changing nature of business but even more important than this how we can give back to the community. The day has really inspired me to do more to help other people that are not as fortunate as us.

To finish off this post have a look at the following video about Jim Rees who shows companies that as long as you put your mind to it goals are achievable no matter how high they are set . Jim competed in a race across America for the last several years. And yes, it was on a push bike!!  The race had to be completed in less than 12 days, so on the first day he cycled 500 miles in 36 hours without stopping and each day he only slept about 1 hour a day.  I think you’ll agree that he certainly proves his point.

So overall it was a fantastic day, I got to meet lots of interesting people and it made me think am I really putting in that extra effort to make a difference in the world I live in. It also helped validate my view that as an organisation if you don’t sit up and take notice of the massive shift in how customers are engaging, communicating and buying online then you will be left behind. So if you’re not sure whether you should be involved in the social business / social media space at a minimum investigate it. Do you agree?