A jackpot at Web Summit

The first day was about registering the alugha team and visiting the area. We could get in touch with some exhibitors who knew alugha before and wanted to see it by themselves. Tuesday was the day: lots of visitors came to our booth - among others, the management team of star and television chef Jamie Oliver. Because its like that: even popular chefs like multilingual videos! It turned out that the team was looking for a long-term solution to make international webvideos. What would be better than our service to make daily videos multilingual? Other companies appeared to be as excited as the Jamie Oliver team. Various companies who run video learning or other portals only came to get a live impression of alugha and our ideas.  Also the team of he next Web conference in New York visited us. Compared to the Cebit in Istanbul we could notice an enourmous increase of interest. We were already excited about the feedback at Pioneers Festival all our expectations were now beaten by the rush on our booth.

Wednesday was a big day: Our boss was invited together with 150 other CEO’s to Googles headquarter exclusively. This chance is only offered to a selected circle of promising companies and can be seen as beeing knighted between the start-ups. Besides a guidance through the whole building everybody was invited to a little sit in with irish live music and a lot of guiness. But not only that - Google was thinking of a challenge with attractive wins. The exercise was to evaluate Googles products systematically. The one who was giving the most inspiring feedback could get some wins from a barrel. By the way - the event was hosted by Urs Hölzle, one of the ten first Google employees worldwide and Senior Vice President of technical infrastructure.

The next day was just as exciting. Besides a lot of interesting topics with international prospects, there was the Google workshop. On the schedule there was the topic “how Google hires”. How to filter one milion applications? Well thats just working with certain filter systems which feed the data bases. Compared to previous years Google now doesn’t only hire the stars of the industry. There is more the question of somebodys expertise and if he or she is a teamplayer. The workshop was a good opprtunity to reflect our own structures. How do we behave and where to improve things.

Generally we have to say we were in love with Google. Because that day they even announced that they would award 20 million euros in cloud services to support start-ups. The only condition was to be a young and strategic promising start-up from the tech industry. Said and done - we marched to the booth and took part. And tatatatataaa: we also can’t believe it but we won cloud services worth 10.000 euros.

Conclusion: the conference, was a huge success and gave us the essential impulses, especially if we consider the talks we had with Google. If anyone has the chance to attend the Web Summit, he should.