WebSummit opens face-to-face in Lisbon for the first time in two years — 40,000 people from all over the world participate, requiring masks to be worn during the session
This article is part of a Web Summit 2021 interview.
The world's largest startup conference, Web Summit, is back in Lisbon. Last year, it was held completely online due to the Korona-ka, but the figures as of October 25, which is published by Our World in Data, which has the highest vaccination rate in the world, are those who have completed two vaccinations. With the full cooperation of the government (86% of the total population), this year's event was held face-to-face for the first time in two years.
During the event from November 1st to 4th, participants are required to wear masks at all times, except for speakers who speak on stage, in accordance with the guidelines of the Portuguese government. In addition, when entering the country and participating in the event, it is required to submit a negative certificate of the new coronavirus or a vaccination certificate.
Japanese vaccine passports are effective in receiving quarantine mitigation measures in multiple countries and regions. Japan's vaccine passport is valid in Spain next to Portugal, but not in Portugal, where the Web Summit is held. Probably because of the existence of a diplomatic bilateral agreement, there is not much traffic between Japan and Japan. Special measures have been taken at Web Summit, and participants are not required to take special quarantine measures (14 days of quarantine is required after returning to Japan from Portugal. For this reason, I abandoned local participation this time.)
More than 70,000 people participated in his Web Summit in 2019, and in 2020, when the Korona-ka forced him to cancel the event, 104,000 people participated online in sessions and networking using a dedicated app. This year's local participation is 40,000 in total on a ticket sales basis, but this number is expected to decrease slightly due to the decrease in air flights and the impact of quarantine measures at the time of entry and departure, and participants The number seems to be about half of what it was two years ago.
During the period, WebSummit will include more than 70 unicorn founders and CEOs, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Challenger Bank N26 co-CEO Maximilian Tayenthal, and WWW inventor Tim. More than 700 people will be on stage, including Berners-Lee, actor Amy Poehler, musician Tinie Tempah, former soccer player Thierry Henry, and Black Lives Matters co-founder Ayo Tometi.
WebSummit was founded in 2010 by CEOs Peter Cosgrave, Daire Hickey and David Kelly, starting with a 150-person event in Dublin and moving to Lisbon in 2016. So far, he has held Collision in Toronto, Canada and RISE in Hong Kong as sister events. Next year, he will hold Web Summit Tokyo under a contract with Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and Tokyo, and his RISE, which was announced to move from Hong Kong to Malaysia, will continue to be held in Hong Kong for the time being.
Manders Terrace, which operates Web Summit, had sales of 47.9 million euros in 2019. It has also been revealed that a dedicated mobile app for schedule checking and networking that maximizes the event experience will be licensed to the United Nations and CES 2022. The company now claims US $ 10 million in damages after co-founder Kelly left the team for establishing the fund "Semble Ventures" (formerly Amaranthine) without permission under the name of Web Summit. I have filed a proceeding.