Last week I attended the infoShare conference in Gdańsk, Poland. The 3 day event is the biggest tech conference in CEE region and gathered about 5,000 tech professionals, innovators and entrepreneurs.
One of my personal highlights was the speech of Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay and Flattr, who argued that “tech is neither good or bad. You/we are!”. He talked about Pirate Bay and explained why they also once founded the “Church of Kopimism”. It was an actuall church by Swedish law with the purpose to fool american media and legal authorities. The church wanted to establish Priest-to-Priest communication, since it’s illegal to intercept priest communication. Peter also talked about his views on how technology might effect our future society and explained his motivation behind going into politics.
Other great talks were held by Jörg Rheinboldt (Axel Springer Plug & Play), Anthony le Roux (Uber), Christian Jennewein (Blablacar) and Bram Kanstein (Startupstash). But since there were many other great speeches, it’s almost unfair to mention just a handfull of them. Let’s put it this way: With three large stages and one startup expo, there was definitely enough exciting stuff going on during the whole duration of the event.
Another highlight clearly was the pitch competition, where startups competed for a main prize of €20K and the chance of €1 million in investments. And the winner of this year’s pitch competition was the Polish biotech startup Nexbio. The startup created a new and efficient way to analyse DNA and describes its solution as the next generation of bioscience.
Aside of many other exciting program points, it was clearly the after parties, that created a perfect atmosphere to network and chat with like-minded people from the tech community. For me, it was both the first time being to infoShare and visiting Gdańsk. The event and city were both awesome, so I’m looking forward to revisiting in 2017.
Check out the video below to get a better feeling of how infoShare 2016 was like:
