Day One Web Summit Review

Web Summit, now one of the largest technology conferences in Europe opened Tuesday, with the great and the good from the technology and business world, like Peter Thiel, Drew Houston and Anna Patterson flocking to the event now billed as #DavosForGeeks. This year’s Web Summit kicked off with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Paddy Cosgrave ringing the NASDAQ’s opening bell for the second year running.

Oculus VR CEO announced that a consumer version of the Rift headset is expected in the next months. As vague as that sounds, it appears to be a progress for the company that got acquired by Facebook in March, just two years after the initial kickstarter campaign.

Dropbox announced a new partnership with Microsoft in an effort to bring Office files closer to Dropbox users.

Evernote announced that a new pricing structure will take place starting from early next year. The company currently offers a free version and a $5 per month paid version of the product but this pricing decision back in 2007 was basically picked at random.

Love and Robots, a 3D printing company that specializes in personalizing, tweaking and editing products to customers’ liking won the ESB spark of genius award. Love and Robots CEO, Emer O’Daly argued that using selective laser sintering technology is positioning them in a good position against the big brands in the field like cafepress and zazzle.

And as part of the new #SportsSummit Guy Easterby described how Leinster use GPS data and player self-assessment to improve their strategies. Even though he views data analysis used in rugby as lagging behind compared to other sports, he claims that he is putting emphasis on analyzing these numbers in a sense that they can give better results, faster.

As with many events of this size, there were problems with WiFI, though for an event about the web it shouldn’t happen. The fact this was happening after 4 years of the event was criticized by attendees throughout the day. Guinness responded with some apt real time advertising, socially newsjacking the situation but the tweets have been since deleted.