Dublin Web Summit - June 2010

As a budding entrepreneur and a member of the web community I attended the Dublin Web Summit last night in the Chartered Accountants Ireland building on Pearse Street. The summit had a good line up of speakers, including Michael Birch, Bebo founder, and Ray Nolan, a home grown success story with HostelWorld. I can honestly say that I took a number of important ideas away from the evening, and I got to chat with other people working in Ireland looking for their own niche.

I'm going to summarise what I got from the summit with three points, and one additional point that I derived from watching and listening to all the talks and interactions I had throughout the evening.

1. Advisory Boards are great
   • An advisory board should not be abused
   • An advisory board should have customers, users and if you can get them key people from your industry
   • Do not pay them a penny
2. Focus on what the customer wants
   • Features are great, vision is fantastic, but it must all be centred on what the customer wants and will use
3. Be Credible
   • Credibility comes from getting funding, having customers, a good advisory board, knowing your market and numerous other ways. All of these contribute.

Personal Additional Epiphany

Information is knowledge and power, but, and this is the key point, do not become obsessed with information. I noticed a number of times that questions would be asked and the answers were often along the lines of "what is that?". I have come to realise I suffer from a massive information overload, this is not news, anybody who spends a significant amount of time online has this problem, and I'm effectively never offline since I got my N1. What I have done in the last few months is tried to limit how and when I consume information. I disabled automatic searching in my web history from my browser URL bar, this has had a noticeable impact on the frequency of visits to time-sink sites especially. I have a 'Weekend Reading' bookmark folder (which may move to Instapaper or some Dropbox style syncing after talking with Ross Shannon last night).

This is a point that comes down to the individual, but I want to read enough to be up to date and ahead of the curve, but also not become bogged down in information and worried that something I'm working has already been superseded; because in fact that article I just read which claims someone has 'revolutionised how we will do business online' is actually the tenth such article this week all talking about different products. I want to be the eleventh article this week, and the only one next week.