Guidewire Group held its third Innovate!Europe event in Zaragoza this week. It's a forum where entrepreneurs and inventors from start-ups, early adopters, venture capitalists, angel investors and journalists can mix and mingle and hear what each other has to say during the conference and showcase. This year, it was held in the impressive Teatro Principal in the heart of the city.
Thirty start-ups strutted their stuff and goodness knows how many speakers and panellists shared their insights. Some was at the edge of IWR's radar, but a lot was of great interest. Innovate provides a glimpse into the future of our digital world. No-one can be sure which companies will succeed and which will fail, but trends are clearly visible.
One of the main themes this year was that of 'discovery'. Not in a conventional search sense but more in the emergence of interesting information as a result of what users get up to in the various social services to which they belong. The other major theme was mobile telephony, especially ways of getting the price down.
Sticking with the discovery theme: you know, from the blog and the forum worlds, that people willingly reveal all sorts of stuff about themselves that they would never give up to an 'expert system' or a clipboard wielder. They find the value of a social web service so high, they are willing to open up. They share clippings, videos, pictures, recordings and their own information and options. They gain by enhancing their reputation and from others' willingness to share their own discoveries and insights.
The service provider can automatically draw conclusions from its clients' activities and make recommendations of other material or people likely to be of interest. A bit like the Amazon system but applied to social encounters.
This page at webjam will give a flavour of what I'm talking about. It also introduces another Innovate theme, a new kind of employee: the community manager.
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