Dumb it Down: Sum up the Dublin Web Summit for me

There's a lot of rich geeks attending the Dublin Web Summit this week so what is it?

Right, what is the Dublin Web Summit? Sound geeky...

It is extremely geeky, but also really impressive... the Dublin Web Summit is taking place in the RDS and it is a massive gathering of the good and the great in the world of internet and technology termed the “Davos for geeks.” It started yesterday and finishes today....

Over 4,000 people, 300 start-up companies and exhibitors and 200 speakers are attending the event, up from 600 attendees from its first year in 2009.

It’s the biggest event of its kind of Europe and sees a host of big names from the industry speaking and advising future billionaire start-up entrepreneurs from all over the world while also discussing the future of how we deal with the web.

The event is worth an estimated €12million to the Irish economy.

How big are these big names you’re talking about?

Big names, billionaire names, you’re probably working for one of their companies... over the past few years Jack Dorsey (Founder of Twitter) Bono and Michael Birch (Bebo founder who made €450 million from selling it) have attended.

This year the big names include Director of Men in Black Barry Sonnenfeld, former US Treasury Secretary and President Obama advisor Larry Summers and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.

A YouTube founder...that’s impressive...

Yep his second claim to fame is that he was featured in the first-ever YouTube video “Me at the zoo”

Wow epic stuff that video - elephants have really, really big trunks, who’d have known? Anyway what about the Irish lads?

Well there’s a lot of top quality young Irish lads that are making waves in this industry at the moment (as well as buckets of cash, b**tards!) Just google Dylan Collins (Fight My Monster) Niall Harbison (Simply Zesty) and whizz-kid 20 year-old James Whelton of CoderDojo, who was awarded  the Ashoka Fellowship and €100,000 investment at this year’s summit.

There were more start-ups at this event this year than any tech event in the US.

Who is King of the nerds?

That would be the remarkably impressive Paddy Cosgrave, a 29-year old go-getter who founded the event and invited all these bigwigs over by basically getting the Founders of Twitter, Skype, YouTube etc. to come to Dublin to talk and have a bit craic.

He’s the son of a Wicklow farmer who has graduated from Trinity, founded a tech start-up company and won the Undergraduate Student Awards amongst accomplishing other things before you have had time to recover from your last hangover.

Also this is his fiancé, model Faye Dinsmore, who has 250,000 friends on Facebook (with good reason!)

Damn you Cosgrave you impressive bast**d! (JOE shakes fist at the sky)

So what are they chatting about?

Well everything really – how mobile is the future and televisions, consoles, PCs and landlines are things of the past and how “liking” things on Facebook dosen't exactly correalate to brand engagement.

Also how Ireland will be spending five times more online by 2017, that's around €21billion.

As well as that there's networking and pitching to top seed funds and investors going on.

So yeah, you'll be washing these hipster/nerd/millionaires' Ferraris some day:

I want to check this out, how do I do it?

Well it’s finishing today, although you could try blag your way into the F.ounders event that starts tomorrow, which is a private gathering of 200 of the world’s top web entrepreneurs in Dublin also organised by Cosgrave. Failing that it will probably be back next year.

Otherwise, sorry about that, you missed out on the iPads and TV’s, as well as three free booze tokens given out on the floor of the RDS this week.

Damn it!