Vinli does Dublin, Web Summit Recap
Team Vinli descended on Dublin for our first foray into Web Summit - the massive 20,000-attendee conference that now takes over the city for a week.
Being our first WebSummit, we were a bit overwhelmed - much like one’s first trip to Austin’s SXSW, but finding our place was surprisingly easy once we started milling about the RDS conference venue. We were excited by the quality of companies selected for alpha, beta and startup expo and thankful for the segmentation of the 2,000 companies.
Our goal was, naturally, to find as many folks interested or actively working at the intersection of automotive, mobile devices, networks, IoT and connected car. Happily, they turned out in spades. Many friends in the nascent space had expo space themselves and found their way to Vinli’s expo stand and others we met congregating around sessions focused on associated topics. Thanks to Vinli’s exposure at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, many knew the name.
It was great reconnecting with other players in the space we previously met in Moscow. Pictured: Chris George, Ivan Klabukov of Hudway and Blake Burris Amidst the expo tour and various one on one developer meetings, we didn’t have much time for attending conference sessions, but we were intent on making it to the Connected Car discussion with Seval Oz of Continental Intelligent Transportation Systems (and formerly with Google-X Autonomous Vehicle project). Seval had several good riffs on the future: "No one wants a car with yesterday’s software story" and "When CPU starts driving the car, humans will be more careful drivers - future forward!”
Chris and I caught up with Seval following her conference for a quick chat and to extend an invitation to visit us at the expo.
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Blake talking with Carlos of Securify from Mexico about enterprise opportunities.
Scott Harper (Vinli Co-founder) and Blake hanging with Tomasz Gidzgier of Mototstat.
MORE PHOTOS FROM WEB SUMMIT
In sum, we were thrilled to encounter so many with a yearning for openness and connectivity in the auto industry. As most of you shared with us, the wealth of data we can generate from our cars is an untapped treasure trove for innovation and efficiency.
If you haven’t done so yet, check out the Vinli APIs on the developer portal. Stay tuned for other hardware and developer updates here and via @VinliDev. It was great to see all our old and new friends in Dublin and hope to see you along the ride.
Upcoming activities: Connected Car meetup in NOLA, Vinli at CES Hackathon in Vegas, and a 5-city Vinli U.S. hackathon tour.
Until next time… Ciao Ciao!