Web Summit Facebook
Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary is one of my idols and he didn’t disappoint. If you watch his videos regularly, you won’t find any new information on this talk but wow, how incredible was to see him perform on stage. I think I had never seen him so pumped up. The energy was crazy! There were 12000 people in the venue and he completely destroyed the room! People were cheering, shouting, a woman in front of me actually jumped up from the chair in excitement. For me, my favorite moment of Web Summit 2016.
Afraid to fail because of other people’s opinions?
Framestore
I really loved this talk. I haven’t been paying attention to Virtual Reality but this did it for me. Framestore is a company that does CGI and visual effects for films like Gravity and Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them. They have been developing a VR game for Fantastics Beast where you are within that Harry Potter. Seeing you actually have the wand in your hand and do magic was pretty great to watch. William Sargent, CEO, showed a video of an incredible “field trip to mars”. Framestore substituted all windows from a school bus for VR screens and took a bunch of kids on a trip to mars. If the school bus accelerated in reality, it would accelerate in mars. Completely responsive to the environment. Awesome! Also, he showed images of therapy that’s being done to paraplegic patients using VR. Pretty powerful and inspiring stuff!
Films will exist in formats we can’t yet imagine
Hyperloop One
This was an awe inducing one too. Josh Giegel, the co-founder walked us through his vision for Hyperloop and it looks amazing! They think that in the future nobody will own a car and that they’ll be able to remove all the container ports from the sea front because Hyperloop will become the main transporter of goods. The future looks awesome!
The age of moonshots and Hyperloop One
Facebook’s CTO
Mike Schroepfer gave a talk on the future of facebook. It was the same information that Mark Zuckerberg presented a few weeks ago but it was pretty exciting to watch too. They are tackling connectivity (trying to bring the internet to more people), Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality.
Facebook’s VP of Messaging Products
I really liked this talk because, alongside Facebook’s work with AI, we can see where Facebook plans to go in the near future: they want to take on the app market. Messenger plans to increasingly bet on Messenger Bots.
You can read how I conquered shyness and talked to hundreds of people at the Summit here
You can read my open letter to Paddy Cosgrave here