When you spot more people with conference lanyards than without, riding the Metro in Lisbon, you know Web Summit is happening and that you’re on the right track. Once a year we love to take a peak outside the social media marketing world and attend conferences with a different focus. This year we decided to go big and travel to Lisbon for the world’s biggest technology conference, together with Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon), Brad Smith (President Microsoft), Marghrete Vestager (EU commissioner) and many, many more.

The challenges addressed by over 1.200 speakers on 23 stages couldn’t be more diverse. From sports to music, robotics to gaming, sustainability to future societies, the Web Summit has it all. Here are some of our favorite questions and how they get tackled by start-ups, global corporations and non-profits:

How can we detect the truth from fake news?

This is still a big question that speakers from the European Union’s data scientists to Julian Assange’s legal advisor and Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser addressed during their sessions. „Sometimes we simply don’t know.“ is the honest but scary answer of livestream news outlet Ruptly CEO Dinara Toktosunova. During their workshop, data scientists from the European Union share, that an article is likely fake, when we feel emotional about it. Taking responsibility for your content is the only way to go, according to Craig Donato who built the multi million player platform Roblox. Given they alone hire 800 people who monitor the platform 24/7 in 26 languages it shows that it can be done.

Panel Discussion with james Ball (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), Brittany Kaiser (Own your data), John Tye (Whistleblower Aid)

How do Mega Trends impact your business?

Imagine you can return your piece of furniture when you don’t need it anymore and all you got to do is pay rent for it. Cool, right? Ikea’s customers will soon be able to do exactly that, announces Barbara Coppola during her keynote. Facing the Mega Trend of downsizing and living in smaller places, Swedish furniture giant Ikea is launching new and innovative business models. Coppola also announces that by 2030 all furniture will be produced out of recycled material and Ikea will be climate positive. Wow, we are impressed!

Will make machine learning marketing more human?

J.P. Morgan CMO Kristin Lemkau doesn’t have an easy job with Fintech and AI threatening the biggest bank of America. She shares some insights how they use services to improve their e-mail marketing with machine learning. Their aim is to make marketing more human with the integration of ML and still give the consumer the control over it. Their goal is to become the FitBit of finance. Whether they succeed is still unclear but we are curious to see more!

What’s the deal with GIFs?

Did you know that Giphy has a huge content production taking place in LA and that all of its content is licensed in-house? So in fact, they do not rely on user generated content. According to their CEO Alex Chung, today 15% of Google Search requests end up on Giphy. (We couldn’t find a source that proofs that btw.) This search however runs on different rules. People are for example searching for „happy, love, sad, …“, no one would usually do that on Google. Have you invested in your own brand GiFs and stickers yet? It might be the right time.

From the raise of investigative journalism to drone delivery, the Web Summit couldn’t be more diverse, which is also reflected by the 43% female attendee rate. If you still can’t get enough, head over to Vimeo to watch all sessions from this years Web Summit.