A lot of Day 2 (Friday 28th of October) was taken up by different panels. Again,this post is just the notes I took during the conference.
I hope it makes some sense.
Alex Ljung, Soundcloud; Jens Begeman, Wooga — Europe’s Hottest Startups, moderated by Robin Wauters
SoundCloud can be thought of as the ‘YouTube for sound.
Jens Begeman, Founder of Wooga number 3 games platform worldwide in 2 and half years.
Both vc backed
SoundCloud based in London, New York and San Francisco
Wooga from London and US
Alex Ljung: harder to get funding in Europe,
More capital available in the US, more willing to take risk
Jens Begeman: its improving, investors willing to travel.
Alex Ljung: Investors are asking me what companies should they talk to. Looking for companies.
Jens Begeman: People don’t want to play complex games, people typically play 4 times a day for about 10mins
Jens Begeman:Facebook relies on companies like Wooga.
Jens Begeman:Google plus, too early to tell.
Jens Begeman:Everyone in the company is based in the one office.
Jens Begeman:Moving into mobile ‘Magic Land’
Alex Ljung:Barriers for music creation going down.
Alex Ljung:SoundCloud has an extremely high engagement level
Eric Ly co founder of LinkedIn, Presdo
Founding Cto of LinkedIn left 4 years ago.
Now invests in other companies.
Presdo: social network for conference attendees
Bootstrap model
Discovered the business based on what the market told us.
What he looks for:
Five year trends:
At LinkedIn spent a lot of time how to build the network.
Studied Spoke to see how they built their network.
Irish entrepreneurs panel
Anne Hearty:asked her boss could she specialise? He said no so she went off on her own.
Cash is king
People side of the business is huge
Brian Conlon First Derivatives based in Newry Software guys didn’t understand the business, so he started writing software himself.
Go and meet people
Learn how to use PowerPoint and see if there is an idea worth developing first
If you are small, get on larger companies supplier lists
Barriers to entry are lower now than ever before
Iain McDonald Skill Pages: A business should be about solving a problem
Helps if you have an empathy with the problem
Just go for it
Anne Hearty: Now is a really good time to start business.
Life is a risk
Failure is an opportunity to learn
Scott Belsky Behance
Largest creative community
Behance now has a platform
Critical mass vs credible mass
James Whelton
19 yrs old
Set up coder dojo
Programming for kids
State of IT education in Ireland sucks
Panel: Nick Bilton, New York Times; Mark Little, Storyful; Nick Bell, News International — The Future of News
Technology hasn’t changed news, there are just now much different tools.
Journalists have a more editorial role.
People don’t read newspaper anymore, read online versions
News companies in a race to monetize online before newspaper revenues completely disappear.
Panel: Errol Damelin, Wonga; Ben Milne, Dwolla; Colm Lyon, Realex; John Lunn, PayPal — The Future of Money
Banks suck
Transactions should be free
NFC is just an interface
NFC stands for ‘no fucking chance’
Mark Read WPP
Increase engagement is the most important.
Advertising is screen vs print not digital vs print vs tv
Recession is a great time to invest.
Noel Toolan, BrandAid; Marcy Simon, Burson-Marsteller
It’s about building relationships
Branding countries
Every challenge is an opportunity
How do you rebuild Libya?
Do an audit
Start with local population
Northern Ireland troubles became the peace process
Don’t over promise and under deliver
You don’t need a huge budget to start
Brands don’t deal with ones and zeros, ie need more than likes
So that was it, for another year. It was an interesting couple of days, I would say that it was more a business conference than a tech conference. I didn’t one slide with code on it.
Having said that, there was great content and it was fantastic to see so many high profile speakers in Dublin.