websummit2016

By the creators of Second Life: Linden Lab was presenting the ultimate VR toy, the social media avatars, It would be similar to Second Life, so you can create 3d objects or buy them to build slowing your 3d world in a marketplace.

Unfortunately for presenters, the demo never worked because their Window machine went into upgrading :)

Sean Rad of Tinder and Farrah Storr of Cosmopolitan UK: Tinder is moving beyond dating to a place where it is really about discovery. Whether it's a person, a group, a political party, an advertiser's product, or a job, Tinder is expanding beyond what was originally envisioned.

PlayStation VR and the future of entertainment

Shawn Layden is the chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios. Previously, he served as executive vice president and COO of Sony Network Entertainment International (SNEI).

Shawn Layden has been investigating the use of VR for movies in Sony for many years. How does VR affects movies narrative when users are free to explore the movie from any path? The answer is not yet here, but we are going to see a wave of VR movies coming in the following future. VR brings movies to a totally new level, but it works best in short movies, it is too immersive for a 90mins movie, so ideal time would be around 15 to 20 mins. VR is just at the beginner, we do not really know what it would come next.

From a billion to none: Life After Vine

How can you kill a product that has billions of users, Twitter did it no many years after buying it, But it was not something that happens overnight. Vine users noticed a big decreased in updates numbers, and general activity on the platform, it seems that Twitter had never got it right, never understood the real value of a 5 sec video social media dream.

You gotta want it

Jake Paul is one of the most famous celebrities on internet, He became really big on Vine with millions of user but he realized that the platform will not last for long and move into Youtube in which he has growth his comedy channel with millions of followers, 

Are the social media platforms the next celebrities catapults?

 A bit more Startups Seeking

Why aren’t the world’s governments ready for the impact of AI on jobs?

Governments are failing to prepare for the impact of artificial intelligence, which is set to destroy millions of jobs, according to a poll of the world’s top technology investors. A survey of investors at Venture, the premier VC event that took place during Web Summit in Lisbon, found that 53 percent agreed that it was “inevitable that artificial intelligence will destroy millions of jobs”.

The second day for me was mainly in the marketing stage that this year was called

I stayed the second day in the morning in the marketing stage or as they called it PandaConf. This stage was particularly interesting because they approach marketing in a quite refreshing way, conversations went across main challenges these days for the industry like startup disruption, ad blockers, IoT, and then some specific talks about big companies' challenges like Booking.com or Facebook.

I'd like to highlight:

State of the advertising nation with Maurice Levy from Publicis Group

He gave a great overview of the big guys' in the advertising industry, how he was invited by the Pope to help improve the Vatican with their message to people, these days disruption in communication allow everybody's opinion to be listed, individuals influence democracies, societies, religions because messages are not vertical anymore but rather quite horizontal. Google and Facebook are taking over the industry and monopolizing the publishing industry, TV and press, therefore most of the players are losing their market shared, only a bit disruption could decentralized their control.

        Sumo Logic and Mozilla

How to use data to launch your brand, and make better user experiences, There are too many products out there for marketing data, more than 1000+ software, but there's not magic software to find growth equations, you need to have a clear KPIs before starting just grabbing all the data, otherwise it will not solve your specific challenges, big data is important but we need to map data correctly against our brands specific.

Facebook's CMO Gary Briggs

Facebook's marketing faces a challenge to bring new features and products into Facebook users in the most seamlessly possible way and get the highest level of adoption and best user experiences. Some example when these changes were not well received was the decision of moving FB messenger out of Facebook, It brought lots of problems and eventually FB decided to keep it within the main app.

Fundamentally marketing has the same goals as always; bringing the values of a product in the most direct and efficient way but technology  helps it to streamline the message.

Augmented Reality: Why everything is not all digital, Ambarish Mitra (Blippar)

Nowadays many companies see press, tv, music as media but they forget that the biggest media in the world is products, there are most cans of cokes in a country than likes in FB, we need to start looking at products as a new channel to content with users, products leads to a new paradigm where users can scan products and decide to buy or not. AR is an horizontal disruption, every industry is being transformed in a way or another with it. Ambarish did a demo in which he scanned a juice bottle and start playing a game a game set within the audience in real time.

Booking.com's CEO Gillian Tans

Booking is the largest online booking company in the world, Their headquarters are in Amsterdam, but they have teams all around the world, They use data all around customer experience, All their changes are fully backed with data. They do around 100 experiments a day and thousands of user testing.

After all these conferences, a bit of networking

Tuesday was the day of the Design Summit. One of the best speeches was called “Neither here nor there” by Marina Willer - a graphic designer, filmmaker and a Pentagram London's first female partner.

In her speech, Marina described what is like to be from one country (in her case Brazil) and live in another (London) for so long, that you do not understand anymore where you are from. This is very beneficial for a designer, because you absorb all the influences from so many different backgrounds. In her own words:

“Being a designer in this world is very much being a designer in ever changing world: we have to absorb many cultures, many influences, and design is very much an ever changing activity.”

She showed how she creates so called “crazy maps” (image below) : life journey illustration to show how ideas and solutions are born.

There are so many accidents and incidents that are happening  on our life, that influence where we get to, all the skills we get, all the things we read, all the looking at the skies, especially having children and the things they say, husband getting drunk the night before, singing a song - all those things can give you amazing ideas, so that’s how the answers sometimes come from. If you are too strict, too logical - you do not see a beauty in a random, in things that happen. Design in our times is much more an act of insanity, it lives in a real world. We do not design for a perfect world, we design for the real world and a user wants to participate, wants to contribute and wants to make a change. So we need to design in the way that users can change it and make it their own.

She told the story about her dad, Brazilian architect. He was designing what he thought were beautiful houses for people, whole districts and how he was getting frustrated seeing how people were always changing these houses: put their own windows, paint them differently. Dad thought he was building beautiful things, but actually he was limiting, putting too much order to what once was very much a free space. Marina, as a child heard such stories and it made her think about freedom as a design.

We live in an Era of inventiveness and craziness, so people don’t expect rules. A great example and influence is Brazil - people there do not respect rules. Let’s take for example how they negotiate traffics - chaos and what is most frustrating - people don’t like to wear seat belts, so they paint t-shirts with seat belts on. It is unbelievable, but it’s a reality and these craziness and imagination inspire: the things you create to get out of situations (health and safety don’t really exist in Brazil). On the other hand - trying to put too much order kills imagination: you look at the designers that put themselves within the rules - their designs are so boring and kitschy, and then you look at children, how free and inventive they are (unfortunately it goes away as they grow). There’s a story how a teacher asks a child in kindergarten: 

- What you are painting?

- I am painting God

- But no one knows how God looks like!

- Now they will !!!

Do spiders have armpits? How do I know if I am awake or I am dreaming? - we stop asking these questions.

The other inspiration is the streets: how they play with the names - SellFridges (they sell fridges), The Cod Father, Frying Nemo, Abra-Kebabra. You look at the Sex Shop banner - it is very expressive and you know straight away what it is, even if the name doesn’t say Sex Shop. Then you get a designer employed, he puts order - Helvetica. Then you get Award-winning designers, they say: I only use Helvetica.

Next morning we went out really early - we were afraid not to get the seats at the Talks. Turned out we were not the only ones who got scared not to get in by Opening Ceremony experience: metro was crowded.

Web Summit 2016 took place in Lisbon in MEO-FIL Arena - the venue, that in theory could hold up to 80,000 people. This year there were approximately 72,000 people from 166 countries - huge number! No Dublin venue would be big enough for it - that was exactly the reason it is not hosted in Ireland anymore.