A crowd of 60,000 people are expected to attend this year’s Web Summit that starts in Lisbon on Monday, November 6th.
The three day event event, “will be the largest gathering in the history of technology companies,” according to the organisers.
“It’s going to be an incredible melting pot of leading minds from every corner of the globe,” said the event’s founder, Paddy Cosgrave.
The technology event started in Dublin in 2009 when just 400 people attended but grew to 40,000 by 2015 and switched to Lisbon in 2016 in a three-year deal.
Portugal’s prime minister will address the conference on Tuesday morning (see below) and the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, then will formally open the Web Summit. The closing speech will be presented by Al Gore, former US vice-president, on November 9th.
The programme includes 25 conferences in two venues as well as 1,000 speakers including Intel’s chief executive, the co-founder and chairman of Tinder, and France’s former president, François Hollande.
The estimated carbon emissions generated by the summit and those travelling to the venues will be offset by the planting of a commensurate number of trees in Portugal to be established and managed by the Navigator pulp and paper company, the current employer of Portugal’s Forest Tsar, Tiago Martins Oliveira. A target of 95,000 pine trees has been set.
The speech by Portugal’s Prime Minister, António Costa, will follow this draft:
"We want to affirm Portugal as one of the best destinations in the world to incubate new projects, to test products and services to later make them global
For the second consecutive year we received in Portugal the biggest technological event in the world. Data released by the organisation reveal that more than 53,000 people from 166 countries visited the Web Summit in 2016. Many of those who were in Lisbon last year are sure to return this year. And to these will certainly join many more who want to be at the forefront of the technological revolution that projects us into the future. Because there is no turning back.
Portugal is in line with the Web Summit and the challenges it brings us. We want to affirm Portugal as one of the best destinations in the world to incubate new projects, to test products and services and then to make them global.
Portugal has changed and changed for the better. Foreign direct investment, as well as general investment and export indicators, are growing at double digits. We now have a stronger business fabric. Companies have been decreasing their debt levels and are increasingly investing their own capital, creating jobs and enhancing their economic and financial health. In just one decade, tourism grew 86% in Greater Lisbon, 136% in Greater Porto and 53% nationally.
We opened a new cycle of economic growth, reaching in the last quarter’s levels that were not seen since the beginning of the century. Growth with a rate of job creation that currently puts the unemployment rate below the European average, something unprecedented since 2005. Prolonging these last quarters in a decade of convergence with the European Union is the essential objective that motivates us.
Creating an attractive ecosystem for start-ups is essential to achieving this goal. In this sense, we have produced legislation that facilitates the installation of technology companies, with a set of tools to support startups, incubators and investors under the Startup Portugal strategy, such as Startup Voucher, Incubation Valley, National Incubator Network or the Momentum program.
We have strengthened the state's venture capital lines through Portugal Ventures, which provides financing to technology companies. We have launched new lines of co-investment with business angels. We reformed the tax code, with tax benefits that favour technological companies and promote investment in R&D projects, such as the Seed Program. We created a €200 million public fund, the 200M, which I announced at the start of the Web Summit in 2016, to attract investors from around the world, supporting the internationalisation of our startups and which finally is operational.
Today we have better conditions in Portugal for talent and creativity to germinate. We have more entrepreneurs. We have more to take the risk. We have more business acumen. We have more scientific laboratories.
We have better research and the ability to attract and keep talent. We have fewer young people emigrating for lack of choice. And we attract even more young people from other countries who want to come to ours. Portugal needs everyone and the more prepared we are, the greater the knowledge and innovation created, the better our collective future will be.
It is now necessary to design this reality in the world, so that Portugal is known not only as a tourist destination but as a modern country, open to the world, innovating and producing knowledge and offering excellent conditions to foreign investors.
I believe that our generation, but especially the younger generations, will be all the more prepared as they become more involved with the technological world. The future is already today, it is now. Together, we will be able to make a difference. It is up to us, political leaders, to create the best conditions for this environment to become more and more conducive."
