Experiences at the summit
When going to this year’s Dublin Web Summit we tried to do our homework in advance.  Using  Presdo Match we identified who we wanted to meet and sent them messages before the conference.  I also wrote a blog post titled “Meetup at Dublin Web Summit?” and we tried some twitter marketingby offering a couch for those in need of housing during the summit.  (That didn’t take off.)Our primary goal during the summit was to get feedback from angel investors and VC’s.

We succeeded in making appointments but most were scheduled to take place after the summit, which was fine since it gave us more time for networking with people we met during the summit.Regarding the rest of the different industries we want to have a talk with it where a miss match, mostly I think this where not their type of conference so we are still looking to talk with Dropship electronics suppliers, consumer electronics wholesale distributor, and Hotel chain marketing executives.We are still interested in talking with dropship electronics suppliers, consumer electronics wholesale distributors and people working with marketing in Hotel chains. We were hoping to come across people in these industries at the summit, but we didn’t meet any, most likely because it was not their type of conference.

We are currently in the process of applying to different incubators  so it was nice to be able to have a chat with Terence Bowden from the Propeller Venture Accelerator program, Gary Leyden from NDRC’s Launchpad and Eoghan Jennings  at Startupbootcamp. We’d like to give a special thanks to Eoghan who contacted us before we moved to Dublin, and introduced us to several interesting people during the summit.

Wisdom from the stage
The Daily Deal industry still produces many opportunities, which was exemplified by redeem & get (provider of management of online group offers) winning the Spark of Genius competition.

Electric Irland’s Tweet Cafè was cool. It was in the central hub, with the tag line “Tweet for a Treat”. It offered attendees and speakers the chance to order free coffee and a treat by tweeting  #tweetcafe.

The Occupy Wall Street movement
Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype didn’t have a straight answer when asked about the Occupy Wall Street movement while on stage.  It’s too bad he didn’t defend capitalism and attack corporatism when given the opportunity. As a sidenote it is interesting that Niklas’ Venture Capital fund Atomico have invested  in our competitor Madbid.com.

Personal Branding
Dave McClure, founding partner at 500 Startups, seemingly builds his personal brand by deliberately cursing and being vulgar on stage.

Mobile
Ciaran Norris from Mindshare validated Mark Zukerberg famous  “The Ipad is not mobile” claim by revealing statistics showing that 98% of Ipad use happens at home.

Some more interesting facts (copy and paste) from the creative agency Boys and Girls:

• Only a third of the Irish population have a smartphone and 50% are still on Nokia’s (Adam Levene,       Grapple)
• There are now more smart phones being produced in the world than standard phones, with over 100 million smartphones being shipped in Q4 2010. (Ciaran Norris, Mindshare)
• In 2010, 10% of Irish internet access was done through a mobile. And Online queries through mobiles has increased by almost 300% in the past 2 years (David Sneddon, Google)
• 33% of people would rather lose their partner than their phone (Ciaran Norris, Mindshare)
• The Hyper Personalisation of Everything is upon us….so consider the 1.2.10 rule, when viewing your screen your smart phone is never more than a foot away, your computer is 2 feet away and your TV is 10 feet away. So which do you think is the more personal/emotive device? (Nick Bilton, New York Times)
•  72% of the UK population have purchased online, with 37% of these having reviewed and talked about their purchase/experience (Maz Nadjm, TSL Education)

All under one, it was a great event, and we will definitely go for the next summit in December 2012
What key points did you take way for this year’s summit?

In conclusion it was a great event, and we will definitely try to make it to the next summit in 2012. What key points did you take with you from this year’s summit?