Last Friday, myself and the rest of the Flax team (Carl Lange and James Kelly) headed up to the largest tech start-up conference in Ireland & the UK, the Dublin Web Summit. The event attracted over 1000 people from around the world, with many great speakers like Marcus Segal from Zynga , Mike Butcher from TechCrunch Europe Tariq Krim from Jolicloud, Mike Downey from Microsoft, Sam Barnett from Struq, Jennifer O’Connell editor of TheJournal.ie, Emi Gal from Brainient and Eamon Leonard from Orchestra. All the speakers were very interesting, though it could have done with a few actual game developers.

Besides the talks, the best thing about the event was being able to talk to people involved in the Industry here in Ireland and abroad. So much so that even after the event ended at 5.00, myself and the lads where still walking around talking to people about what we where doing here at Flax.ie and listening to what they are working on until around 8.00. I met so many extremely interesting people, it was almost hard to remember them all. Plus, there was free beer so some partial memory loss was to be expected. The summit had a good mixture of developers, entrepreneurs, investors and the media.
 

Oh, and people taking photos of your event tag is the new environmentally friendly business card. Since our business cards haven’t arrived yet, I encouraged people to just take a photo of my event tag.
 

It’s great to see big tech events like this here in Ireland. I am a strong believer in the Irish technology Industry so I hope to see more of these events coming to the country, in particular games development.
 
It’s a credit to the event organizers @paddycosgrave and @Alice_Ryan and many others who where involved in setting up and running the event. It even had quality wifi, and with free beer and ice cream, where could you seriously go wrong?

Also at the summit @paddycosgrave announced he was in the process of organizing an even larger tech event for October, which is to span 2 days with up to an amazing 75 speakers. I look forward with anticipation to hear more details about it and attend in October.

 
Myself and the lads had a great time at the Dublin Web Summit 2011, and made some great contacts. I would strongly recommend you attend these events if you’re related to the tech industry in any shape or form.