Digital Festival: By far the best Swiss conference

There are few or no events for the people of us that make it worth traveling to Zurich from abroad. With one big exception: with the first edition of the Digital festivals The organizers Jonathan Isenring, Manuel Nappo, Rasmus Rothe and Schoscho Rufener immediately organized what was by far the best conference in Zurich. Sven Ruoss has already written a conclusion on his blog and got it off my chest, which is why I limit myself to my impressions.

Broad digital festival program

A good conference is characterized by top-class speakers. With speakers like keynote speaker David Shing (Digital Prophet at AOL), Philip Inghelbrecht (Co-Founder Shazam), Alain Chuard (Co-Founder Wildfire) and Joachim Schoss (Co-Founder Scout24, organized by the Swiss Start Up Factory) the organizers definitely succeeded. The speakers examined digitalization or aspects of it from very different perspectives, reported on their experiences and, above all, encouraged young entrepreneurs. Evernote has kindly compiled summaries of the presentations. Also Tobias Zehnder has his key take-aways on his blog held.

Even on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. the Kaufleuten was full (and not with stuck party guests), which definitely speaks for the high quality of the program.

In the afternoons, small groups were able to discuss individual topics in depth in various labs and work on questions together. At the same time, you had the opportunity to make acquaintances with exciting participants.

Interesting participants

While the tie ratio was quite high on Thursday morning, this changed after just a few hours: some adapted their menu to the relaxed conference style, while others, who routinely simply attend every event, returned to their corporate offices due to their lack of digital understanding. The mix of participants was correspondingly interesting: representatives of innovative corporates, consultants and successful entrepreneurs, and most of them were easy to win over for an exchange.

I was able to make a lot of high-quality contacts during the Digital Festival and hold a few meetings in the Pelikanbar. It's worth the journey just for that.

HackZurich: Once again the epicenter of engineers

Last year I was fascinated by Europe's largest hackathon. This year, HackZurich was integrated into the Digital Festival, although the overlap was still relatively modest. I can warmly recommend that all participants of the Digital Festival pay a visit to the hackathon in Technopark and see with their own eyes the motivation and breathtaking speed with which developers from all over the world program projects under high pressure for a weekend.

Incidentally, Team Ivy, who developed a voice-controlled website builder, more than deserved to win. By creatively combining different tools via API, the team of four managed to build a functional prototype between Friday evening and Sunday morning.

Conclusion: The Digital Festival is a great enrichment

While others only talk about it, the organizers of the Digital Festival have created a unique platform: the conference at Kaufleuten as a good mix of entrepreneurship and corporate culture, the BBQ on Thursday evening as a great networking event, and with the HackZurich they have demonstrated how ideas become digital products in no time. There is no better way to make the digital lifestyle more tangible and experience it.

See you at the Digital Festival 2017!