Events
Five ideas from this year's Web Summit
Alex Blyth
Managing Partner
Tim Berners-Lee, Pharell Williams and Mo Farah. There aren’t many events in the world where you can see that line up. But at this year’s Web Summit you could. Held in Lisbon every November, it’s Europe’s largest tech conference.
More than 70,000 people gathered from across the world to do deals, share ideas, cram into Barrio Alto bars, and talk AI. Actually they mainly talk AI. You kind of have to these days. As Karen Boswell, Global CXTO at VML pithily put it: “AI won’t replace people, but people with AI will replace people without AI.”
But a few people had other ideas as well – here are five of the ones that caught our ear.
1. Sport is one of the few places left where humans can still be humans
Mo Farah – sorry - four times Olympic gold medal winner Sir Mo Farah, was launching the Global Running League: two-day festivals of running on F1 tracks around the world, elite and amateur runners competing on 5-15 km races, even some Mo Miles for kids.
“Think of the emotion you feel when your team wins,” said Marcel Muenster, CEO & Founder of the League. “Or how you can be at an anonymous airport and see someone wearing your team’s cap, and you feel a bond with them. We see that with football, basketball, almost every sport, but not with running – that’s what we want to change.”
2. You can DJ now just using your eyes
Alex Hamilton, Director of Innovation at Dentsu Lab took us through Dentsu Labs’s All Players Welcome project, which used AI (told you everyone was talking about it) to allow paralysed DJ, Masatane Muto to DJ using only his eye movement.
More than 200m people worldwide live with physical disability – imagine how this idea could transform their lives.
3. “More men than women are watching women’s sports”
According to Eric Johnson, CEO at SurveyMonkey anyway. He surveyed 14,000 people worldwide so he must know. He also revealed that, apparently, we trust sportswomen 2.7 times more than we trust influencers.
Leela Srinivasan, CEO of Parity, a network of 1100 sportswomen, agreed. “We’re seeing a gold rush in women’s sports,” she announced.
4. Brian Collins is organising some fun holidays
Conference ever-present Brian Collins was there with his typically inspiring talk about the need to imagine our own futures, but he’s also now added in a few holiday snaps.
He’s recently started organising cultural trips. It started near home in NYC, but has branched out to Ireland, Rome, now Lisbon. It’s a simple formula: he asks who wants to come to a place and talk about the future - for the first event 500 people signed up in 24 hours.
I’m not quite sure what this all has to do with anything other than some interesting people having a wonderful time in a beautiful place, but, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Bhutan’s next…
5. Nokia is launching the first cellular network on the Moon
It’s the company that brought us the first telephone so it’s only fitting they should be the first to put a mobile signal on the Moon.
It’s quite incredible. Now, do they have AI on the Moon?
