What CEOs Talked About at the Web Summit 2017?

Web Summit is a tech conference held annually that emphasizes on the latest innovations in technology. The attendees and speakers range from all spheres of business from Fortune 500 companies to startups. The audience and leaders include a mix of CEOs and founders of tech startups along with a range of people from across the global technology industry, as well as related industries. Many C-level executives become an active part of this event giving insights into the future trends and disruptions happening across the globe.

This year the Web Summit was held at Lisbon, Portugal from 6th to 9th of November. Some of the speakers included Stewart Butterfield - Co-Founder & CEO, Slack; Steve Huffman - CEO, Reddit; Brian Krzanich - CEO, Intel; and many other prominent leaders in the technology. There were also a few government officials who actively contributed to the event. Some of the names included - François Hollande - Former President, Government of France; António Guterres - Secretary-General, United Nations; António Costa - Prime Minister, Government of Portugal and many other leaders.

At NewGenApps, we had a chance to interact with some of the speakers and attendees at the event. Here is what they felt about the event:

The Marketing Trends You Need to Know:

John Lincoln, CEO of Ignite Visibility, shared some interesting discussions at the event. He was also one of the speakers at the event and had some great insights about the upcoming trends in marketing. Here is a first-hand account of his experience at the event:

I had the pleasure of speaking at Web Summit today, which is the largest tech event in the world. Over 60,000 people who all love tech. It's crazy! I spoke with Rand Fishken, the Founder of Moz, on SEO: The Movie, as well as the future of search, social and the web. You can watch his panel here.

Being on the ground floor at this event, I thought I would report on a few topics before getting into the normal content of the week. First, I had a long talk with the Head of Foreign Affairs for a major European country. He was very concerned with online privacy issues. Not only that, he also wants to use the power of Internet tracking to capture those who could potentially commit considerable crimes via the web. In general, the restrictions on privacy and digital regulations are tightening by the day here in Europe. I would expect a larger scale of similar constraints to come to the US soon. There is a lot of alarm over online use in Europe. Each person I spoke to, regardless of their country, seemed to have a strong sense of responsibility and/or opinion on the matter.

On the digital marketing side, we are seeing the MASSIVE buzz around four things. The buzz is about artificial intelligence, social media, video marketing and personal assistants. People are most excited about these new fields, as well as better targeting for paid media. However, at the same time, they understand that the tried and true methods for current online business revenue and lead generation are still pay per click, search engine optimization and email marketing. These are emerging channels and tech.

Also, there was substantial talk about chatbots, the use of artificial intelligence and pre-set protocols to answer marketing related topics through social media, email, websites and more. Some people love this idea and others hate it.

Overall, there was a lot of optimism at the conference and every marketer I spoke with made it clear: they are investing more in digital and less offline. There is also a drive to get creative.

The last thing I'll say is that I spoke to a number of artificial intelligence companies and many people who were interested in artificial intelligence for different reasons. At the end of the day, there are really only three companies that are good at this practice, Google, Apple and Alexa, with Google being by far the best. Many smaller players are interested and want to get involved. In many cases, however, these players don't know what they want and developers don't know how to build much for the mid-size businesses as the tech is just too new. All of the platforms for building AI systems are still in their infant stages. It still feels a few years away from being something that can be adopted by a normal marketer of a 5 million to 100+ million business.

Ethereum To Be Web 3.0:

Nicole Bermack, SEO Manager at Sturm Media LLC also shared his experience of the event. Here is what she said:

I attended some of the blockchain talks and was struck most hearing about the bullish nature of the developers on how Ethereum, Whisper, and Swarm will create the Web 3.0.

It was also interesting to hear about how sharding is the solution everybody currently believes in for fixing transaction volume bottlenecks, though I personally believe more in directed acyclic graphs.

What I'm noticing is that there's still a free for all on what the best chain or method will be and if we need public or private chains. A lot of people at WebSummit believe Ethereum to be the God Chain but the public vs. private debate is still in the air.

Our Take:

Overall the event was a remarkable success and definitely worth attending. The growing popularity of chatbots, artificial intelligence and blockchain is something we feel very positive about. At NewGenApps, we have had a chance to interact with many C-level executives over time about the trends in these technologies and the industry leaders seem very positive about the future. We believe that it is something that we can definitely build upon and leverage in future. If you want to know more about trends in the evolving technologies then feel free to check our blog: