The Highlights of the DigitalK 2017 Technology Conference
Sofia gathered more than 60 lecturers and over 2,500 visitors during the annual two-day technology conference DigitalK – one of the leading digital technology forums in Southeast Europe.
On June 8 and 9, the organizers from “Kapital” and the funds LAUNCHub Ventures and NEVEQ gave the audience the opportunity to meet with the latest trends in the world of digital transformation. Key topics this year were the new business models, structures and processes created by the turbulent digital transformations, the latest blockchain technology, technology innovations in payments, self-driving cars, the best ad channels and formats for today’s consumer and what will be the first applications of artificial intelligence.
Among the lecturers of the event were Naveen Jain, serial entrepreneur and author of the Moon Express project which envisages extracting resources from the moon (and in fact the first person licensed to fly passengers to the moon as the company has NASA’s and the US Federal Aviation Administration’s approval for such flights); Dani Behrendt – the man behind Apple’s self-driving car; Brock Pierce – among the pioneers in the introduction of digital currencies in games and chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, as well as a co-founder of Blockchain Capital; Peter Kim – digital strategist, currently head of Digital Consumer Engagement at the Lego Group; Masha Yoveva – Senior Product Designer at Instagram and many more of the visionaries who set the themes of the future today.
Photos and videos from the event can be viewed on the Facebook page of DigitalK 2017.
The human dimension on digital transformation, now at Digitalk @erikvonommersen #Digitalk2017 pic.twitter.com/oHodmklddw
— Digitalk (@digitalkcon) June 8, 2017
The traditional competition for start-ups with a prize pool of EUR 10,000 took place at the main stage of DigitalK. Out of this year’s 200 applications, 15 ideas under development gained the right to be presented before investors on a big stage on the first day of the forum. Three teams reached the final – two from Bulgaria and one from Turkey.
The big winner this year was Bulgarian ClaimCompass with its project for providing legal assistance for delayed and cancelled flights or in case of denied boarding an airplane. So far, the young company works for flights within Europe, but plans to expand its services to India, Brazil and the United States.
The others finalists were the Turkish segmentify and the Bulgarian ToolDomains. Segmentify offers tracking of user behaviour on e-commerce sites and helps vendors customize their services to the consumer.
ToolDomains presented its Eye Domain system – a search engine for domain names with a current database of over 700 million entries, with plans to grow and add new services to the platform.
