THE WEB SUMMIT

I will be attending the Web Summit here in Dublin most of this week and I would like to thank the organisers for providing me with media access every year since 2011.

I am planning to publish lots of photographs via flickr.com … please visit and search for ‘infomatique’ if you do need some free to use images.

I missed the 2010 event because I was not paying attention. I am seriously considering attending the next Summit in Lisbon but I would need to spend at least two weeks in the Portugal.

I really did enjoy all the events that I have attended to date so I am happy camper.

In 2013 I encountered WiFi annoying access problems but in 2014 I had absolutely no connectivity problems. However many people located near me were constantly claiming to have problems but when I had a look at their setups their settings were incorrect.

According to reports in local and international media the WiFi network collapsed during the first day of Web Summit 2014. Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave took to the main stage to apologise for the connectivity problems [I have a video of this]. “We have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to get the wifi working; it’s incredibly disappointing.” I think that approach adopted by the organisers showed a lack of judgement and experience because rather than accepting responsibility for an event that they organised they decided to blame a third party and this is never a good approach.

In September of this year Paddy announced that the Web Summit would be held in Lisbon starting in 2016. As I had suspected right from the beginning that they would eventually move to London I was more than surprised by the decision to move to Portugal. However, I do believe that moving to London would not have worked for a number of reasons so Lisbon is not a bad choice.

After the announcement of the decision to move the 2016 Web Summit to Lisbon many claimed that the WiFi debacle was the main reason for the move. Such a claim can only be due to an Irish inferiority complex, which I thought had died out many years ago. Usually politicians and media here in Ireland get overexcited when they read the following “Summit attendees were mostly disparaging in their remarks, with some deriding it on social media as the most Irish thing ever". In this instance the politicians were not too excited and there are many reasons for this. Statements such have “The most Irish Thing Ever” have absolutely no meaning except to navel gazers here in Ireland. Bear in mind that many if not the majority of the people from abroad who visit the Summit in Dublin probably think that the RDS is somewhere outside London.

Last year a lady from California asked me what was the best best way to travel to see the ‘changing of the guard’. Of course, if things go wrong next year we will hear expressions such as ‘the most Latin thing ever” and decide that we must immediately remove Lisbon from our list of potential holiday destinations.

The Web Summit people made a business decision to move and that is all there is to it.

The good news is that one can witness the changing of the guard at Belem Palace in 2016.

THE SILLY STORIES HAVE ALREADY STARTED:

• Whoops! Enda Kenny looks almost certain to miss the final Web Summit 2015 in Dublin this week after only receiving a formal invitation late on Friday evening. Conor Pope has the story. More than 30,000 attendees are expected to attend, including 1,000 investors, 800 journalists and 2,000 start-ups from around the world.