Invest in Sofia at Webit.Festival Europe’17
On April 25 – 26, Sofia was the digital capital of Europe within Webit.Festival Europe – the largest event for digital economy and technology in the region. In the heart of the festival’s exhibition area, the Sofia Investment Agency’s team organized an area where the festival’s guests were welcomed to learn of the opportunities for business in Sofia.
To make a special presentation of the city and in line with the festival’s theme, we branded the tent so that when scanning with a mobile device different areas in the tent an augmented reality video about the capital would start. The video started by scanning the tent wall, the entrance poster, and small real chocolate bars branded with the Invest Sofia logo.
The augmented reality in our tent was done with the help of iGreet, who were guests in our area and presented the capabilities of the AR technology that they develop for different media and bring into use in different business areas. The other companies joining us were the young team of Sofia Tech AI Lab with control of robots via brain waves, Robopartans, who demonstrated how children learn to build robots, NeoFeedback – with biofeedback technology that teaches us to voluntarily manage unconscious processes in our body with a computer game and two sensors on the hand, and Tickey – with their project in the field of urban mobility.
We are delighted that the innovative ideas of these young teams attracted great interest among the festival guests and they established contacts with potential customers and partners for the promising technological solutions they are developing. “Two things were extremely helpful to us,” said Trayana Vukadinova from NeoFeedback. “On the one hand this was a reality check of our product – reactions of specific type of audience and visitors, method of presenting the product itself, opportunities for development in the future, financing opportunities, access to different markets, etc., and on the other hand – new contacts, including ideas for joint development of complementary services not connected with the core product, based on the biofeedback technology we use.”
Outside the festival’s exhibition area, Webit’s visitors could choose between 12 parallel conferences, including the Dev Summit, the Digital Transformation Summit, Marketing & Innovation Summit, Digital Economy Leadership Summit, IoE Summit, Health & Wellbeing Summit and the Smart Cities Summit which was under the patronage of the Mayor of Sofia Mrs Yordanka Fandakova. A hundred startups with a total market value of over $ 2 billion presented their innovative ideas to an international jury of investors in a contest for the grand prize of Founders Games – an investment of € 200,000.
Here you can watch a full recording of the opening and presentations on the big stage during the two days of the festival. And here – the video “Sofia Green & Tech City”, shot especially for the opening of the festival on the idea of Sofia Municipality as host of the event. The video was broadcast for the first time as part of the welcome speech of the Mayor of Sofia, Mrs Yordanka Fandakova, when opening the two-day festival.
