Web Summit 2022

How heya?

This was my second time at Web Summit, and I still can say that it is massive. I can say “it is crowded” to the point that it could frustrate all visitors. I spent one hour and twenty minutes on the first day to get in, forty-five minutes on the second day to get in and one hour and fifteen minutes on the last day just to put my bag on the baggage drop plus fifteen minutes to get in. Yes, I missed a lot of the morning talks.
You can check my 2018 event review here.

With 71033 attendees from over 160 countries, more than 1000 speakers, over 2296 startups, 24 tracks to follow, and over 200 employees working hard to prepare it, Web Summit grew to be the largest technology conference in the world and has been called the best one on the planet.
The 2022 edition in Lisbon made a record of the number of participants, number of Brazilian attendees, and number of Women attendees.

Some official numbers.

Not everybody knows, but all of the talks from all paths become available online after the conference. Make sure to check it out on the Web Summit Youtube channel.

Web Summit, In a nutshell, it’s something that started as a “simple idea” in 2010 to connect people in the tech community and evolved into the biggest technology conference in the world, or, as Web Summit co-founder Paddy Cosgrove puts it, “World’s largest gathering of entrepreneurs.”

Web Summit Brazil – Next year, in May 2023 the Web Summit will host the first-ever Web Summit outside of Europe, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It’s expected to bring 15,000+ people and companies to redefine the tech industry. More information can be found on the official website.

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Crypto, Web3, NFT, FTX, and Blockchain were the top trending topics. I would estimate that more than 50% of the companies present had those words jammed somewhere in their presentations, descriptions, business cards, or swags, even if they were not involved in those fields. Another trending topic among the companies present was Remote Workforce Management, which simplifies how companies employ global talent, handle local payroll, taxes, benefits and ensure compliance, making it possible for employers hire top talent quickly and compliantly. This is not a new topic but seems to have become strong after the pandemic, when everyone understood the power of remote work.

Another thing that I saw this time was that they add bots for some countries to show all about startups in the specific country. A saw several countries there and of course Brazil.

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In the talks that I saw, “Streaming” and similar topics are the trending topics, from Data Streaming to Data Mesh. Big data, VR, and others were practically none and people were talking more about the usage of AI than just about AI itself, but of course, GitHub “Copilot” was a buzzword used in a lot of presentations.

My notes from one of the talks;
“Bad data is eating your time” Speakers: Barr Moses (Monte Carlo), Jennifer Strong (MIT Technology)
https://websummit.com/schedule/ws22/timeslot/bad-data-is-eating-your-time

Data is becoming unprecedentedly important for the companies and societies using them. We never saw companies investing that much money into data and data-driven organisations before now! But unfortunately, Barr Moses saw many data-driven companies failing because they couldn’t really trust the data they were using. For instance, a big insurance company applied bad credit scores because of the data they used. This resulted in millions of people that lost access to their mortgages, and other important contracts in the life of an individual, etc. For decades, we have had plenty of tools and automation to help us monitor that things are still working correctly in our systems. Data is created, updated, and transited through those systems, but data analysts do not have the same tools as DevOps to monitor if the data are still correct at any point in time. The industry needs to understand that having tools to monitor the system that uses the data is great, but we lack automated tools to monitor the data in themselves.

Highlights

Google Cloud organised a challenge for developers attending the Web Summit, the Cloud Hero, which was a game played through Google Cloud Skills Boost, an interactive environment to experience the platform and gain hands-on experience in the Cloud Infrastructure. It ran a week before the event (from October 24th to October 27th) and the top 10 participants won a Google AIY Vision Kit. Luckily I made the top 10 and got my prize at the Google Cloud booth on the first day of the event!

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Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska took part in the opening ceremony and Ukraine’s Vice PM Mykhailo Fedorov came to look for alternatives to attract more investments to the country.
Binance’s $500 billion investment in Twitter

https://twitter.com/WebSummit/status/1587532202744561665?s=20

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Takeaway

It’s a big event, planning is everything, you need to schedule your day well there.
It’s not a very techie event and will be a lot of buzzwords, as a developer you can get upset with that.
With a lot of content and information, you need to be prepared to absorb it as much as possible.
In Portugal everything is a QR codes, looks like the government uses QR code for everything, from government info to payment systems, and this was translated in the event with QR codes everywhere.

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Lisbon is amazing, nice food, nice weather, nice people, and of course, they speak Portuguese.
I had the opportunity to visit some nice places and of course, enjoy the nice Portuguese cuisine.

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