So, day 3 is done! We had Drones, we had the Pitch Competition final, and we had Bono!
Here are the talks I found more interesting
Whenever a Drone flies on stage, people tend to notice. And so it was. The state of the art, uses, regulations, and other issues were discussed.
Three European startups: Bla Bla Car from France, Transfer Wise from Estonia, and Home Delivery from Holland (above), talked about the challenges of being born in Europe.
Hadi Partovi (above) of Code.org told us about the great initiative “Hour of Code” taking place in schools all over the world, and what you can do to participate.
Tim O’Reilly and Liam Casey (above) discussed wearables, today and tomorrow.
Matt Mullenweg (Automattic – above) and Tony Conrad (True Ventures) discussed WordPress origins, raising money and company culture.
Quote from Matt: “Don’t just think of the What; think of the Why”
John Hayes, CMO of American Express, and David Karp, CEO of Tumblr (above) discuss Brands, Marketing and Digital.
Quote from John: “To be old is to believe the past is better than the future. To be young is to believe the future will be better than the past”
We then had the Pitch competition. 6 finalists out of 1500 presented their companies before the judges. They were:
– Basestone (UK)
– Mimi smart hearing (Germany)
– Tracknstop (Ireland)
– Re3D (USA)
– Apploi (USA)
– Codacy (Portugal)
I am proud to announce that Codacy was the winner in its class, and will be travelling to Coca-Cola in the US to learn from them and make contact with this global company. All the best to them and I’ll be talking to them soon.
Paul Mc Guillney (above), golfer and captain of the Irish team on the Riders Cup talked about leadership and the power of images.
Mark Pinkus (above), founder of Zinga told us about his entrepreneurial journey and his future plans.
Peter Thiel (above), recent author of “Zero to One” discussed investing, artificial intelligence, space travel, Silicon Valley, the startup landscape in Europe, whether there’s a new tech bubble, security vs privacy, Tim Cook coming out, and being a billionaire.
The conference ended with a discussion on “Movies and music in the 21st century”. The guests, including Bono, talked about the evolution of the cultural industry, transparency vs opacity, the move to deliver U2’s latest album on all iPhones, and, of course, the future.
These have been three days jam-packed of great content all over the venue. I stuck to the main stage, but all over the place were great events taking place. I managed to talk to two of the Portuguese startups present: Look Ouch and Muzzley, who had a stand here and were looking to get even more attention in the international landscape.
I’m very looking forward to coming back in 2015 and excited about what the future holds.
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