These images are from November, Web Summit 2019. I thought to share them with you now, as soon we will be seeing the 2020. A little story of Lisbon and Web Summit Adventure.
Web Summit 2019 Notes
First of all,
While I was writing this post, one of the Pink Martini song I love “Donde estas donde estas Yolanda” was playing in my head, (where are you where are you Yolanda) I was asking for my mind when singing…
Podcast woman broadcaster Zreen asked me to company her at the Web Summit. I actually never heard of The Web Summit before. Zreen’s business had two tickets worth more than 1000 pounds given by Woman In Tech (what a wonderful organization, supporting woman entrepreneurs)
This Web Summit happened just on the right time for me as I have just been recently had an unpleasant experience with a cowboy manager at my recent work. The good thing is, after I left my feedback on Glassdoor about this cowboy manager, my ex company called me more than 3 times to investigate the feedback I left and after that investigation they fired him. Happy days! You can copy and paste the link below to your browser if you want to find out my Glassdoor Feedback as a Turkish Speaking Advisor.
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Employee-Review-BookingGo-RVW28978853.htm
Okay lets forget it!
When I got on the plane to Lisboa, I could smell tech people were in the plane, I was sitting right next to the founder of an innovative company called Shela , They are in the business of professional matchmaking. Shela offers a space for investors to meet with people with great ideas. Shela is inviting Investors around the world to join their video enhanced platform where they can find connect and possibly invest in the next great mind. Wow, what a brilliant crazy business. So dragon program on TV is coming alive online too. Matching the professionals with the right roles, It is well worth to look at their website to find out more on https://www.shelarecruitment.co.uk/ I did wanted to photograph the founder of Shela there and talk with him about his application but maybe in the future now..
And our apartment we stayed was right next to the ocean, on the stepped hill where cars were spinning to climb up. So we were spinning to get close to the apartment door too. So funny that there was a little gallery right opposite the flat and this gallery is called Pickpocket Gallery, It was closed or inactive, we couldn’t see the inside. I did make a Google search but website was down. The owners are probably in prison. The Art of Pickpocketing Gallery?
The first day we arrived, we went looking for coffee shops and the first one we entered to ask coffee, they were just staring at our faces, kind of ignoring us with miserable faces. I was surprised and we just left that nice little coffee shop and restaurant also and went to another one. This time, we tried to be more animated with our faces so they will love us and give us a coffee. There were two ladies with lovely chef outfits working in the kitchen and also there was a man there with his little English he was talking to us in a Tarzan accent. The restaurant was only open till 2 or 3 pm and all tables were empty as they were preparing food, we were just smiling extra to communicate with them. We had a wonderful coffee there at last, we had espresso and I asked Latte after that, all cost for both of us not even 4 Euros, and after that we decided to go to this same restaurant to eat on another day. Once we got in the restaurant all the tables were packed, this time with full of Portuguese man, most of them were all dressed up and there were not one table empty, we managed to learn that this coffee shop restaurant was only for taxi drivers.
We were all disappointed with it, then we went climbing the hills in Lisboa city to find a nice decent place to eat and found one after a long struggle, and this time waiters were all smiley and they kidnapped us from the door quickly and we ordered some muscles and one little, tiny mini octopus, and at the end the bill was 96 Euro.
Can you imagine, I was saying to Zreen its fine, I will find you really good restaurant by walking with my animal instinct’s. And made her a very long walk, most of the walk was just climbing, and see what happened, We have been badly ripped of for nothing. Animal instincts not always work! Otherwise, we would have been run by dinosaurs right now, in it? We eventually found a lovely honest working restaurant and it was not even far from our airbnb flat and enjoyed the food there twice.
We met some great people there at restaurant on that night, they were having a company meal and after a chat, They invited us to their company to visit them, we had only couple more days left but we still decided to use a day to see them and their embroidery and the rest of the other art work they are doing in there called Fabrica_Moderna.
We were very excited on our journey there to see these wonderful artist people in Lisbon, thinking they are so kind to invite us. At some point, we were even walking right close to the motorway to find them, we did get lost along the way but we found the place but then it was all disappointing for me, I thought they were over sceptical about our visit and that actually put me off writing about the marvellous art work they were doing there. I felt like I am invading their space.
Why invite people to your work place and treat them like secret agents I don’t get it. To me humanity is the biggest art of all! There is nothing more serious than humanity.
More than 70 thousand tech lovers have been gathering in Lisbon for years and, I did not know that. Hundreds of speakers, entrepreneurs, start-ups, and presidents (our precious , USA’s project dictator president to destroy Turkiye, that person was not there), Akon (Oh my universe, how can he be my most listened Spotify top artist of 2019? not in 2020 that’s for sure) … they were all in Lisbon for a meet up. Isn’t that crazy? I am with a 4 Kg Nikon Camera, I just wanted to create some visual content and make some arm mussels. I love to record the time with a movie also. It did make me feel like go back to my years in Istanbul, working as a reporter and photojournalist.
There were Press Conference’s every day at the web summit, Although I was complaining to Zreen about why giving so much time to press conference’s but not to entrepreneur speakers… actually to listen to conference’s, yes indeed that was important part of the summit too, so I shut up and recorded some of the names speaking. My personal selfish intention was to be able see Akon at his press conference. I am hoping videos I upload on here will give you some idea. I would had added the transcript of some talks of the web summit, however, the application we used there to be able to catch up with the program of this huge event is not a friendly application. As soon as the web summit over, all the info deleted out from the app. So Paddy please change this, so we can go and look for reference, come on people each person is paying more than a thousand Euro to get in this Web Summit so why not keep them happy. It would had been great to use the application whole year around but no, who will be kind about things like this hey!
You will see a lot of portraits of Paddy Cosgrave, founder of Web Summit, why ?, perhaps he is so photogenic! Sure He grew up in a farm in Ireland, that is why he is photogenic may be. He started these summits in 2010; Approximately 400 people attended the first Dublin Web Summit in November 2010. That would have been better summit to follow up for me; this 2019 one was hard to catch up.
What was very interesting to me is:
This year web summit had whistle blowers and activist speakers. One of the press conference was about Julian Assange’s imprisonment in London and the lawyer Juan Branco, Assange’s one of lawyers answered the questions.
Juan Branco mentioned that When Julian Assange was locked up in London for doing his job journalism, Iraq War Criminal Tony Blair is free, right now at the summit for his talk.
When Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange got arrested in London for hacking USA military documents, all the media was there. But one media was there at the Ecuador Embassy in London 24/7. This Russian backed news agency Ruptle was the only news agency to film the first.
Another whistle-blowers, Brittany Kaiser drew a huge crowd at a press after her talk at Web Summit. I really liked this lady and made a little video about her talk at the conference and press conference. Britany Kaiser is an American business development director for Cambridge Analytica which collapsed after details of its misuse of Facebook data were revealed to have potentially impacted voting in the UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (from Wikipedia )
Let me know if you enjoyed looking at these images.. Just a bit fun!
With love and kindness…
