Weldon and Bono join Web Summit line-up

Alcatel-Lucent chief technology officer Marcus Weldon, House of Cards executive producer Dana Brunetti and U2 frontman Bono have been added to the line-up of Web Summit speakers.

Mr Brunetti produced the film The Social Network, the story of how Facebook was created. He is also the president of Trigger Street Productions, a production company founded by Kevin Spacey in 1997, and more recently he has been the executive producer of hit Netflix series House of Cards.

As well as being the chief technical officer of Alcatel-Lucent, Mr Weldon is also the president of Bell Labs.

They join actress Eva Longoria, Dropbox founder Drew Houston, Cisco chief technical officer Padmasree Warrior and former Apple chief executive John Sculley, as well as Facebook's first investor, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel.

The opening day of the Web Summit next Tuesday will see American stock exchange Nasdaq opened remotely from Ireland.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave will ring the opening bell on stage in the RDS, and the opening bell ceremony will be displayed live in New York on the Nasdaq MarketSite Tower, Nasdaq's iconic digital sign in the heart of Times Square and on the Nasdaq studio wall within MarketSite.

Mr Cosgrave said it would be one of the few times the Nasdaq opening bell will be rung outside the US this year, and marks the fact that the Web Summit is Europe’s largest tech event. The world’s biggest technology firms, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, are listed on the Nasdaq.

The Web Summit will also see PC giant Dell recreate the university dorm room in which the company was founded by Michael Dell in 1984.

‘Pitch perfect’

The mock dorm room will play host to “pitch perfect” coaching sessions, where senior Dell executives will give feedback and advice to the 200 start-ups shortlisted to take part in the Web Summit’s pitch competition.

Workshops on a range of topics relevant to entrepreneurs, including how to manage customer segmentation and how to scale a company for growth, will be offered in the dorm room.

Some 20,000 people are expected to attend this year’s event in Dublin from November 4th-6th.

Over the past three years, Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Tumblr founder David Karp and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal, have been among the speakers at the event.