NET RESULTS:Tired of the treadmill of over-familiar tech faces? Two imminent events might grab you, writes JOHN COLLINS
MAYBE IT’S a celebration of the new €380 million convention centre in Dublin. Maybe it’s a sign of an industry that’s bucking the general economic gloom. Or maybe it’s exactly the opposite – that people are underemployed and have plenty of time on their hands. Whatever the reason, over the last year there has been an explosion in conferences and networking events taking place in the technology sector.
If a smart economy is built on the amount of talking a country can do about it, China, Singapore and even the US had better watch out. The Irish are coming and we mean business.
While the quantity of events on offer may have increased rapidly, the quality has not. Most of these conferences charge €300 or €400 for attendance, feature one or two star turns from the international speaker circuit and the usual suspects from Ireland making thinly disguised sales pitches for their companies, and seem designed to keep local event organisers in business.
A more welcome trend in recent years is the “unconference”, events where the attendees actually give the presentations and do most of the organising. They are predominantly attended by bright young web things who wouldn’t be seen dead hanging out with the suits at the paying events. As a result, they have much more energy about them.
Preferably they have a name that ends with camp (Bizcamp, Barcamp etc), take place at the weekend (because there are no boundaries between work and private lives), and involve a healthy dose of socialising (ditto).
Is it any wonder that someone recently joked on Twitter that they were thinking of organising a camp whose theme would be how to organise a camp?
With so many events taking place, it begs the question as to whether some in technology ever do any work or just spend their days updating contacts databases and sending LinkedIn invites to people met at conferences.
The irony is that technology was supposed to make the need for such meetings go away. Video conferencing technology may be ubiquitous and extremely useful in certain scenarios but, let’s face it, you can’t beat the chance meetings, overheard conversations and strengthening of professional relationships that come with face-to-face dealings at an actual conference.
I’m not suggesting that all conferences are a waste of time – just the eight-hour-death-by PowerPoint sessions that leave you vowing never to leave the office again. Meeting peers, discussing issues in your industry and hearing from acknowledged experts can be valuable. A day spent at a well-organised conference with speakers and attendees who challenge the norms is a day well spent.
But attend enough events in a single industry and you start to see the same faces cropping up in the audience and, even more worryingly, on the speaker panels. Fortunately there are signs that some event organisers are willing to break the mould.
The Dublin Web Summit, which takes place at the end of the month, is an event that has quickly risen to the top of the pile since it first elbowed its way on to a crowded calendar a year ago. Its organisers have managed to attract top-class speakers to these shores such as Craig Newmark, founder of classifieds service Craigslist; Matt Mullenweg, the man behind popular blogging platform WordPress; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Wired editor-at-large Ben Hammersley; and Michael Birch, founder of once-dominant social network Bebo.
More importantly, it has managed to get local web developers, business people, investors and advisers to give up time and money to attend events generating that much-maligned phrase – “a buzz”.
This month’s event features the strongest line-up yet. Keynote speeches will be delivered by Chad Hurley, founder and chief executive of YouTube; Jack Dorsey, creator and chairman of Twitter; and Niklas Zennstrom, founder and former chief executive of Skype.
The Irish contingent is represented by people who spend more time growing their business than their public profile. These include Paddy Holahan from mobile software firm NewBay; Greg Turley of CarTrawler.com, one of the world’s largest online distributors of car rental; and Fred Karlsson from classifieds website DoneDeal.ie.
Not content with the success of the Dublin Web Summit, organiser Paddy Cosgrave has undertaken an even more ambitious event, Founders, which will take place the weekend after the summit. An invite-only low-key gathering of 100 founders of some of the most innovative tech companies around the world, you could think of it as a Davos for geeks.
In addition to the tech “rock stars”, Founders will feature contributions from the wider world of business and politics, including Mary Robinson, Bob Geldof, Peter Sutherland and Taoiseach Brian Cowen.
Exclusivity doesn’t always fit well with the Irish psyche. Our gut response to an event that’s invite only is often Groucho Marx’s quip he wouldn’t care to join a club that would have him as a member. But an event drawing founders of leading tech firms to Dublin where they meet the entrepreneurs behind Ireland’s most promising start-ups and see what we have to offer has to be applauded.
Other conference organisers take note.
Karlin Lillington is away
