The Web Summit is an annual reunion for technology; but it isn’t just any annual reunion; it is the largest tech conference in the world. This gigantic tech gathering was created in 2009 and was originally held in Dublin, Ireland. But, since 2016 it has been taking place in Lisbon, Portugal.
This year’s Web Summit is programmed for the 5th to the 8th of November 2018. The most important people and companies attend this event yearly, and share with others their progresses with internet technology and its related subjects.
There are 23 different conferences programmed for the Web Summit 2018, which are:
AutoTech, binate.io, Content Makers, Corporate Innovation Summit, creatiff, Forum, FullSTK, Growth Summit, HealthConf, PandaConf, Modum, MoneyConf, MusicNotes, Planet: tech, Q + A, SaaS Monster, Talk Robot, SportsTrade, Startup University, Surf Summit, Pub Summit, Sunset Summit and Night Summit.
CEOs, founders, presidents, entrepreneurs, investigators, developers, startupers; everyone from every type of area and stage of their tech journey, from all over the globe, gather here, at the Web Summit.
Some of the international-known companies that feature in the event are some of the biggest names in technology; Google, IBM, Facebook, Microsoft, Booking.com, Paypal, Mercedez-Benz, BMW, Brightline Initiative, Mckinsey&Company, and Netjets, amongst others.
For the 2017 edition, the numbers were historical, with more than 70,000 attendees, 12,000 + speakers and 2,600 + journalists, all from more than 170 countries.
Within that amazing amount of over 1,200 speakers at last year’s Web Summit, were the following tech celebrities:
Elon Musk.
Founder of Tesla and SpaceX (just to name a couple), considered the real-life Iron Man, due to the similarity he shares with the character: science, technology, power and money. Musk is an investor and businessman who is constantly and consistently developing technology in a variety of areas and industries, for example, the automotive industry, finance and money transfer (PayPal), spaceships, and others.
Travis Kalanick.
Maybe his name doesn’t resonate with many of us, but the name of his co-founded company does immediately: Uber. A company that started small, as a startup, and spent time seeking for investment, because too many investors thought Uber’s business model was a terrible idea. Today, Uber is a major hit internationally, thank to its innovation, added value and accessibility.
Ed Catmull.
Co-founder of Pixar and now the president of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios also attended last year’s event. He is a computer scientist and he’s in charge of the most famous and successful Pixar-Disney films that have been honored with academy awards.
Will.i.am.
He is famous and mostly known for being one of the founders of the great hip hop group, The Black Eyed Peas. But, Will.i.am. is not only a remarkable musician, he is a record producer, actor, entrepreneur and philanthropist as well.
Joseph Tsai.
A Taiwanese-Canadian businessman, co-founder and vice president of the Alibaba Group, one of the largest e-commerce businesses in the world. He works alongside with the famous Jack Ma, who is the executive president of the company.
Reed Hastings.
You’ve probably heard his name before, but in case you don’t recall, he is the founder of that internet streaming platform you use too often; Netflix. Hastings is a businessman and philanthropist while also being the executive director of Netflix. But that’s not all. He is a board member of Facebook, KIPP and DreamBox, too.
Another speaker of the past Web Summit, and probably the most memorable, was Professor Stephen Hawking.
The beloved and sometimes controversial theoretical physicist from the United Kingdom, who served for many years of his lifetime to the prestigious Cambridge University. He sadly passed away just a few days ago, on March 14th.
That is just an extremely small list of the total amount of speakers that gathered in Lisbon in 2017. The information, statistics, experiments, data, progress, theories and contacts that are available at the Web Summit is impressive.
Imagine four complete days of immersing yourself in all this knowledge handed by these tech role models. A young tech entrepreneur could attend the Web Summit 2018 for the first time, and who knows, maybe by 2020 that same entrepreneur could be a speaker at the conference, thanks to the acquired knowledge.
It is most definitely an enormous and incomparable boost that any tech professional could use to his or her advantage in today’s competitiveness and rapid progress in this industry.