Dublin Web Summit 2014 Day 3: Centre Stage

In the third and last day of Web Summit, the enormous tech conference celebrated recently in Dublin, Ireland, we headed to the Centre Stage to attend the talks of some noted speakers arousing our interest. Here, our highlights.

A view from the audience at the Web Summmit Centre stage — A view from the audience at the Web Summmit Centre Stage

An hour of code

Hadi Partovi, co-founder of education non-profit Code.org, introduced us to the worldwide campaign “Hour of Code”, an initiative aimed to demystify computer science and inspire millions of school students to learn to code. The campaign, born in the U.S. in 2013, is backed by technology leaders like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and many others.

The Iran-born entrepreneur said that even if computers are everywhere, increasingly impacting every field of human activity, computer science is just on the recovery from a 10-year decline. In the U.S., there are fewer computer science students than 10 years ago, meanwhile in Europe only 11 countries have science/coding in the schools’ curriculum, at the same time as “every single industry is desperately trying to hire programmers”.

Initiatives like this Hour of Code try to address the matter. Even if anyone (teachers, parents, etc.) can host an hour of code anytime, the next milestone will be happening during the week of Dec. 8th – Dec. 14th, when they plan to achieve the goal of tens of millions of students around the world trying an hour of code.

Hadi Partovi introducing the "Hour of Code" initiative — Hadi Partovi presenting the “Hour of Code” initiative

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Dublin Web Summit 2014 Day 2: Machine stage

Here, our recap of Web Summit Day 2, the vast tech conference that took place at Dublin, Ireland in early November. As in the first day, we chose to stayed focused on Machine stage, where world class speakers talked about projects into areas that catch our attention: maker culture, 3D printing, open hardware, DIY, crowdfunding, Internet of Things, and many others.

The long tail of making

Since its foundation in 2007, 3D printing company Shapeways is aimed to make 3D printing accessible for everyone. During his enthusiastic talk, Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO and co-founder of Shapeways, showed us the expanding possibilities of 3D printing, currently being possible to design and print, for instance, custom phone cases, model trains, jewellery, board games, etc. As he put it, “only your imagination is your limit”.

Shapeways provides services and tools to the members of its community to create and print their own objects, even for those without prior knowledge on 3D technologies. On the other hand, Shapeways is also a marketplace where makers and designers can get profit by selling their own designs.

Weijmarshausen also talked about the recent partnership agreement with Hasbro, Inc, to produce 3D printed models of characters of My Little Pony. That could open a path to further agreements with other licensed media companies as both, companies and their fans, benefit. It helps fans, because they can choose and decide about their most beloved licensed products; and it benefits companies as well, saving huge amounts of money in marketing and testing campaigns. Though “we still need something like Spotify for 3D printing”, he finished assuring that “in years to come, we are going to see the profound impact of these technologies”.

Peter Weijmarshausen announcing profound changes to come

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Dublin Web Summit 2014 Day 1: Machine stage

Technology conference Web Summit was held in Dublin from 4th to 6th November, an impressively huge and very well organized tech event, where around 20,000 attendees from more than 100 countries met. During three intense days, we found gathered a great amount of insightful speakers sharing their ideas, enthusiastic startups willing to met investors, as well as countless workshops, roundtables, network sessions, presentation pitches, demos, stands, and also night parties.

Actually, the event featured several summits happening at the same time: Builders, Enterprise, Food, Machine, Marketing, Music, Sport, amongst others. The first day, we mainly attended the Machine Summit, where a line-up of noted speakers discussed about topics like the Internet of Things, smart cities, wearables, robotics, 3D printing and human-machine interaction.

From Hollywood to the real world

In the morning, one of the first speakers that impressed us was the interface designer John Underkoffler, pretty widely known for his work as science advisor on SF films like “Iron Man” and “Minority Report”. This MIT Media Lab alumni gave us a visionary glimpse of where human-machine interaction is heading. It looks like definitely you can forget your mouse, keyboard and other devices as 3D space UI is becoming the emerging trend. Oblong Industries, the company where Underkoffler serves as a CEO, has been working since more than a decade to make real the cool gesture-based data interface technology featured in the film “Minority Report”, and they are almost there with G-Speak, an spacial operating environment, whose first commercial application is the conference room solution Mezzanine.

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