Irish geeks’ appetite for networking is healthy, judging from attendance at Dublin Web Summit
It was standing room only at the Dublin Web Summit, as entrepreneurs and investors flirted with each other like it was 1999 again. The third web summit event in less than a year organised by serial web entrepreneur Paddy Cosgrave, it appears the Irish tech community’s appetite for networking is far from sated.
Kicking off with a burgers and beers BBQ lunch, it was a half-day for geeks to leave the safe confines of coding to mix and mingle in full 3D.
The speaker line-up was a cocktail of lessons, from those who are already making their tech millions, like online gaming company Zynga and display advertising newbie Struq, to elevator pitches from Irish start-ups tipped to be the next big thing.
Marcus Segal, chief operating officer of Zynga, the US social gaming company behind the CityVille and FarmVille games, was a star draw. An unknown four years ago, the company is now the world’s largest social game developer, with more than 250 million monthly players.
Originally made popular through Facebook but now, keen to avoid being a mere parasite on Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth, Zynga is developing games for iPhone and Android devices, and is reported be in talks with Goldman Sachs to lead its initial public offering.
Arriving in Dublin the night before the summit, Segal heard from the group’s San Francisco headquarters that the company’s latest game Empires and Allies, launched just a week earlier, had crossed the five million players daily mark. “Not bad for a week’s work,” quipped Segal, before speaking at the event.
Summit attendees who wake in the dead of night with doubts that their business idea may actually be batty can look to Zynga for comfort. The company’s games, free to play, earn their keep by flogging “virtual” goods. With 44 million “farmers” playing its FarmVille game alone, the company sells gamers virtual animals, tractors and crops for their cyber farmyards.
So people are buying stuff from Zynga that doesn’t exist? At his company’s new Dublin office and with his tongue slightly in cheek, Segal says: “You can ask ‘is it real?’ but a real tractor is not 60 or 80 cents. [With Farmville] I can have the experience of owning a tractor and driving it around my farm without any of the headaches. I don’t have to keep it clean, I don’t have to put fuel in it and yet I can have this experience with my tractor – and it’s really a joy, a great escape.”
Entrepreneurs wearied by investor derision will be buoyed by Zynga’s ability to make millions from selling invisible tractors, but the trajectory of online advertising entrepreneur Sam Barnett is bound to inspire envy.
Founded in 2008, Struq’s success in personalising online banner ads has already landed Barnett on the Sunday Times Rich List. With a personal fortune of £40 million (€45.6 million), he turned 28 the day before the web summit.
Addressing the summit, Barnett said his was the story of an underdog. Working in advertising, he figured the effectiveness of online display advertising could be vastly improved if each browser saw an ad unique to them.
With clients including EasyJet, Barnett explains the airline uses Struq code on its site to capture browser data such as the length of time spent on the site, the time of visit and what they browsed to build a profile of who is most likely to be profitable.
“If a browser leaves the site without purchasing, the code will track them to their next site and serve them a personalised ad.
“In 2008, the venture capital market dropped to a 12-year low and the ad industry crashed; I couldn’t get a loan,” Barnett recalled.
In 2009, he had a product that could ”predict which browsers could be profitable to a company to an accuracy of 95 per cent . . . but the company was broke, we couldn’t even afford an internet connection.”
It was only because his landlord, facing jail, stopped collecting rent that he could afford to keep the lights on. The company’s product now yields clients £19 in revenue for every £1 spent and Struq’s success has made Barnett one of Britain’s richest men under 30.
With the company’s three-year growth chart resembling a hockey stick, Barnett’s message to Dublin’s tech entrepreneurs was to “embrace your underdog spirit”.
Home-grown talent came in the form of three-minute pitches from four of the participants in Enterprise Ireland’s Internet Growth Acceleration Programme (iGap).
iGap aims to help high potential internet companies put together aggressive international growth plans and the event heard from alumni Phorest, a company that manages online reservations for the hair and beauty sector; Tunepresto, which creates original rights-free music for slideshows and video; WhatClinic, which helps people to locate a health clinic; and interactive language company RendezVu.
With the tech news pages in the late 1990s awash with Irish e-learning companies such as Riverdeep, PrimeLearning and NETg, RendezVu co-founder Paul Groarke says he’s hopeful his company can revive the sector here.
RendezVu’s virtual language tutor delivers an oral exam, correcting students on grammar and pronunciation. With 250 million students trying to learn English in China, Groarke says his subscription-based product allows them to build confidence. “It turns out most of those learners are too scared to speak to a human; they actually prefer talking to our avatar so it bridges the gap.”
The voice-activated remote control of Irish tech start-up Amulet also attracted interest at the event. Designed for use with Windows Media Centre-powered TVs, company chief technology officer Eddy Carroll says Amulet’s aim is to get its technology inside all set-top boxes.
“If I speak a command like ‘search for Coronation Street’, it will show all the episodes of Coronation Street over the next several days,” said Carroll demonstrating the product to a steady stream of visitors.
With a fourth Dublin Web Summit planned for October, organisers better hope techies don’t get their hands on this or they may never leave the house.
