Nephila @ tech conferences | Web Summit

As the web industry grows and technology continues to advance, so do we!
Recently team members from Nephila have attended some exciting national and international conferences to keep up to date about new technologies and connecting with people from all over the world. We think it is important to keep up our readers up to date with the latest news and information so here is a short recap of what happened at our most recent conferences.

The event took place in Lisbon, Portugal November 6th through the 9th. In seven years Web Summit has become “the largest technology conference in the world”. It initially started with 400 attendees and now has over 60,000 attendees from all around the globe and attracts both companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and startups looking for best practices to become successful. Despite the size, it’s still welcoming for everybody: this year it featured 25 tracks with creative names, from StartUp University, for startuppers to Creatiff, for creatives and designers, ContentMakers to PandaConf.

Everybody could find something interesting because of the huge variety of speakers: about 1,200 passionate and world class speakers that came from all different professional backgrounds, like as CEO’s, actors, politicians.

Viviana described the experience as an “energizing” event featuring many speakers that share their successful initiatives and show the imminent benefits of new technology. Among the various speakers she particularly appreciated Geraldine Calpin, CMO and CDO for Hilton Hotels & Resorts. Innovation is what moves Geraldine Calpin company forward: at the moment it’s the only hotel chain that offers digital check-in and digitals keys on the mobile phone. Geraldine spoke about digital opening doors and closing sales for Hilton and explained how Hilton is using technology to win customers over and earn their loyalty by giving them an overall better digital experience. Viviana also liked the fact Web Summit provided space to IT ethic topics that highlighted the importance to focus on your team and customers rather than just the data and technology.

Emanuela described taking part in Web Summit like being on top of a mountain and being able to see the horizon while at the conference.

She particularly enjoyed listening to Lars Silberbauer, the director of social media at LEGO, who explained how LEGO is now rethinking their social media with creativity and diversity in mind with the motto “Think like a kid.”

Emanuela highlighted that this conference is much different from the ones we usually take part in, that are mostly community oriented. Web Summit did not focus very much on open source as in fact it only hosted a single panel about this topic, "Open source and data opportunities", which goal was exploring the impact of open source on data and coding communities.

Lisbon’s conference has been the occasion to collect more insight about how Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will influence our daily life in the future. AI powered chatbots, for instance, could be useful for brand to improve the way they communicate with consumers. They will drive conversations, under the principles of the so called “mirroring” and thus they will allow brands to adapt to every individual and their personalities. Moreover in 2018 SEO will change accordingly and a query satisfaction rate will be crucial for a good ranking. Last, but not least, among the big companies, Facebook is shifting day by day from consumer to business: the company is in fact focusing on “Workplace”, a platform especially tailored for companies which behaves like a company management tool.