Lisbon applied to host the edition 2016 Web Summit, one of the most important technology conferences, entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe, in a process that will compete with cities such as Paris, London and Cannes.
The announcement was made by Deputy Prime Minister, Paulo Portas, who was on Thursday meeting in Lisbon with the company organizing the event. Since 2010 Summit web has been taken in Dublin. This year also in the Irish capital, will take place in November.
The Secretary of State for Economics, Leonardo Mathias, who is leading the application process, told the PUBLIC waiting for a response from the organizers by the end of September. The first contacts took place in March, when they “asked for information to various cities.”
The evaluation of proposals is done through a range of criteria including the number of beds in hotels to accommodate the thousands of participants over the three days of the event, available flights, and also the “links the cities to entrepreneurs, startups and entrepreneurs,” said the secretary of state.
In recent years, Lisbon, like other European cities, has witnessed an ecosystem of growth entrepreneurship in the area of information technology, with the emergence of business incubators, acceleration programs, conferences and the appearance of new investors.
The Web Summit is a heavyweight in the world circuit of technology events. Among the speakers were already Elon Musk (American entrepreneur co-founder of PayPal and Tesla cars), Niklas Zennström (the Swede who co-founded Skype), and stars like Bono, the lead singer of U2. This year will participate, among many others, the president of Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, the director of technology of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer, a founder of Instagram, Mike Kriege, and the maker of antivirus Kaspersky Eugene Kaspersky .
In 2014 conference attended by 22,000 people. For comparison, in June, the hotel sector in the Lisbon metropolitan area recorded an average of 37,000 daily overnight stays.
“You need to create the ecosystem in Portugal so that you can join technology, entrepreneurship, connection to universities and schools, he noted Leonardo Mathias. “Portugal has much to gain from the Web Summit, which would give visibility to attract entrepreneurs and investment from outside.”
One of the highlights of the Web Summit is the startup contest in they are primarily intended not only to a specialized jury, but also to an audience with thousands of potential investors and international journalists.
Last year, the Codacy a company born in Lisbon but registered in the UK, It was the winner of the competition in the “beta”, which distinguishes startups that have passed the initial phase and achieved some investment. The Cocady, who won ten thousand euros and a trip to the US to meet with Coca-Cola executives, develops and markets a service for companies that automatically reviews computer code for flaws.
Often Portuguese startups end up by registering in the UK, even though the operations, especially technological development, remain in Portugal, where costs are lower. Going to the UK lets you get more easily to venture capitalists that country, which prefer to deal with legislation they know. “I prefer that Portugal export goods and services, not people,” he said in this regard Leonardo Mathias. “But we have to believe in the laws of supply and demand.”
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