Takeaways from Web Summit 2017

Among the speakers were CEOs and founders of large companies and start-ups, digital experts, IT specialists, astronauts, musicians, politicians and robots, all representing a wide variety of companies from new fast-growing companies such as GoDaddy, Tinder, Hubspot and Slack, to larger listed companies with a long history such as Siemens, Société Générale and Axa.

Robots will leave us with more free time

Two less ordinary speakers were the two robots, Sophia and Albert Einstein. They met in a debate, discussing what the effects will be for humans living  alongside robots in the near future. Their conclusion was that robots will take some of our jobs but contrary to this being a negative, it’ll leave us with more free time to do more of the things that we enjoy!

For more about the robots visit singularitynet.io.

16,000 ads per day to get Trump elected

An example of how to successfully reach people through social media comes from the American Presidential election in 2016. We listened to Brad Pascale, Trump’s campaign leader, who told us how he hired employees from Facebook to help them out in the best viable way. They worked on the project fulltime and delivered 16,000 ads per day.

Start-up mania

As usual, there were a lot of interesting start-ups presenting at Web Summit. One of them was the Swedish company Karma. Through their app, restaurants, cafes and grocery stores can sell in-date surplus food to consumers who rescue the food at a lower price. One third of all food in the world is thrown away and the environmental effects are devastating. Karma’s app is a great idea that combines saving money and our world!

Earlier this summer Karma announced their plans to offer their app outside of Sweden.

Measuring user’s emotions

Technologies measuring user’s emotions through face and eye scanning are constantly developing and we’re increasingly hearing more about how companies are utilising the user’s emotions as a tool for their advertising campaigns.

Emotion measuring is said to help deliver more personal information to users, however this is challenging as we all visit websites in different situations, feeling different emotions and with our individual personalities.

Although sometimes overwhelming, Web Summit is all in all a great place to go for inspiration and networking. If you missed it this year, it is already possible to sign up for next year’s event 5-8 November in Lisbon, Portugal.