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?