Top names to speak at Dublin web summit

THE TECHNICAL masterminds behind YouTube and LinkedIn will be among the international keynote speakers at the Dublin web summit…

THE TECHNICAL masterminds behind YouTube and LinkedIn will be among the international keynote speakers at the Dublin web summit in October.

Jawed Karim was just 26 in 2005 when he co-founded YouTube with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and earned more than $65 million the following year when the service was sold to Google.

Eric Ly, was the founding chief technology officer at business networking site LinkedIn, which was valued at almost $9 billion when it made its stockmarket debut last May.

“Jawed and Eric have been behind two of the internet’s juggernauts,” said Paddy Cosgrave, organiser of the summit. “These are the shy guys who don’t really like speaking, but they are the brains who built these hugely successful platforms.”

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Last autumn’s web summit attracted international attention when it ran in parallel with the invite-only F.ounders event for young web entrepreneurs. Speakers and attendees included Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey and Michael Birch, the British entrepreneur behind the Bebo social network.

This year the event will have a more eastern flavour with some of of China and India’s leading technology entrepreneurs, chief executives and investors in attendance, including Richard Liu, chairman of 360Buy.com, China’s largest e-commerce site which is valued at more than $10 billion and Peng T Ong, co-founder of Match.com and partner with Asian venture capitalists GSR Ventures, which recently raised a $350 million investment fund.

Mr Cosgrave said there had been significant interest in the event from international investors who wanted to meet Irish entrepreneurs. To facilitate their interest, a “start-up zone” at the event will feature 50 of Ireland’s most promising new technology firms.

The two-day summit will take place in the RDS on October 27th and 28th next. Close to 1,000 people attended the last web summit in June and Mr Cosgrave said a similar number was expected for the October event.