Long-time techie Hubert Grealish says, no to technology without a cause at the Web Summit in Dublin. He talks surfing the web and surfing the seas at the headline event

Nothing is real till it’s experienced, as the poet John Keats says. Well this is certainly true for the Web Summit in Dublin, now into it’s fourth amazing year.

Pretty much anyone who’s got any vested interest in tech will have had an eager eye on the summit, now easily Europe’s largest tech event with 22,000 influential folk in Dublin for the week. I’ll share a few first-hand observations:

Innovation waves are shorter, though increasingly events-focused – big deals, brands launched, folk made famous. Perhaps seizing a growing global interest in finding a new tech mecca, the summit is bringing the best minds and budgets together, for one critical week in the year.

Human need supercedes even content – content’s the key talking point though we still need to keep the focus on what’s real. It’s easy to fall for ‘talk tech’ and not ‘do’ and share it. To cite Elon Musk himself, he hires those who “Did the work...not managed it.” We’re beyond nice logos and ‘clever’ straplines, we need to continue to cut out the noise.

Make ‘wow’ experiences, not messages – technology for innovation’s sake is even less important than before. If I’d any single advice to all the many (great) startups I met with, it’d be to refine their human need and really scramble the team to get more folk loving and experiencing their products. That’s the kickstart, the juice. The only people perhaps less into that might be investors, to start with, but I’d still work to really find a wow (with no forced demo demons!) to win them over. Some call it the hustle, others plain old doorstopping and focused networking. If you really are good and believe, then prove it by socially engineering great experiences and talks. That’s what’s needed at events to cut through the parallax designs and half-baked, exaggerated slogans.

Life happens fast, the summit even faster – there was a handy meeting app and the interesting thing about the outage I noticed was some folk (myself included) didn’t get het up. I walked up to folk and found who I was after. Never loose the abilty to talk to people, fresh. Some of the best talks I had were through informal chats, no apps needed!

Everyone mucks in – the whole country gets behind the summit, right across the board. Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave thanked the city of Dublin for getting behind it, while everyone from An Taoiseach, the Irish prime minister Enda Kenny, TD and Bono with countless others threw significant energy and spirit into the mix. It’s a profoundly Irish experience it has to be said, albeit with everyone else on Planet Tech Earth. Even at the follow on Surf Summit in Mayo, the Taoiseach’s home county, Kenny charmed the audience. He got a standing ovation from cheery surf techies, taking manies the selfie too. That was certainly evident at every level of the summit, kudos to Cosgrave and to Paul McDonnell, the startup director, who personally worked through over 15,000 startup applications to get the best 2,000. There really was a great sense of leadership and enthusiasm at the top.

And of course, it’s all about the kids – such as with a great Allied Irish Bank secondary school initiative. AIB Bank was just one example of an initiative that got 20 school boys and girls to learn from the best in the business. I had the honour to mentor them, which was great fun and they had a great time finding the human needs for all these new techs.

Maximising all available partners, platforms and especially people with over 100 full time staff and hundreds of volunteer well-wishers and workers, the summit’s going from strenght to super-sized strength thanks to the belief in fostering brilliant networking, which far exceeds expectations. With all the world’s technology and hope for which it applied.