Every two weeks, The Next Web helps you keep track of interesting technology events around the globe by bringing you a list of upcoming tech conferences, meetups and get-togethers.

As the end of the year approaches, we’ve already added a few of next year’s events. For most of these events we’ve arranged a special discount on tickets. If you think your event should be included, feel free to submit it for review.

*Denotes events organised by The Next Web.

TNW Conference Latin America — 28, 29 August — Sao Paulo

Join The Next Web Conference in São Paolo this summer to do business, learn about the future of the web from international top speakers, and celebrate one of the fastest growing international innovation hubs in the world.

2-for-1 pricing is in effect until May 22nd.

Startupbootcamp Open Pitch Day – Multiple Dates – Multiple Cities

Open Pitch Days are informal events where startups can pitch their companies to Startupbootcamp and experienced mentors and receive instant feedback. The aim is to add value to all startups pitching, and to find top-notch startups relevant for the Startupbootcamp accelerator programs. The Open Pitch Days are therefore also used as part of our screening process. All start-ups should apply. If you are a mobility, connectivity or big-data Startup, we’ll have a closer look.

Please see the calendar on the Startupbootcamp site for a complete listing of events and their respective cities.

The App Summit — 21 May 2013 — Las Vegas, NV

Join us at the world’s longest running event dedicated to apps, mobile web and new media strategies. Hear from industry leaders as we discuss the next generation of applications and platforms. We are the Official Partner of CTIA 2013 – One of the worlds most important mobile events

Developers: Contact Larry Lockhart for $99 developer rate

eTail Latin America – 22-24 May, 2013 – Miami Beach, Florida

Participate in the 3rd edition of the eTail Latin America and gain access to cutting-edge technologies, tools and best practices to improve your e-Commerce within the Latin American market and debate about the main issues and opportunities to become a high-level e-Commerce store.

TNW readers use code 19406003TNW for 10% off registration.

EyeforTravel’s Travel Destination Summit Europe — 23, 24 May 2013 — London

EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit Europe is the biggest meeting place in Europe for senior online travel professionals. Established in 1997, it attracts some of the best minds in online travel to meet, network and do business.

Code TNW150 will get you a £150 discount on registration.

Lean Startup Machine Amsterdam — 24-26 May 2013 — Amsterdam

Lean Startup Machine is a three-day workshop where attendees use Customer Development and Lean Startup principles to validate an idea for a new product or service. Bring your team, or come alone and new teams will form on Friday night.

Social Gaming 2013 — 23 May 2013 — London

Social Gaming 2013 will ask the key question “What next for the social gaming industry?”

With a focus on both social gaming and social gambling, the conference will tackle issues including: the commercial and legal challenges that the social gaming industry faces, regulatory conundrums, the monetization of social games, the case for and against self-regulation and what the future holds for this ever diverging industry.

TNW 20 takes 20% off when registering here.

On The Edge Digital — 23 May 2013 — Manchester, UK

After the success of the 2012 On The Edge Digital Marketing Conferences, these incredible events are back! The Manchester conference will take place, 23rd May, at the Renaissance City Centre Hotel. We guarantee you will walk away with the knowledge and tools necessary to implement an effective Digital Marketing Strategy. Topics include; mobile, content marketing, SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social media.

TNW readers get their tickets for £100 (+VAT) with the code TNW100.

Medialab Sessions // Bruxelles — 24 May 2013 — Bruxelles

Medialab Session is an experimentation to build a new media with journalists, developers, designers and bizdev. Three topics have to be discuss: Content, Business Model and Community Management. Medialab Session is the new way to create your own media, a very smart media !

Android Developer Conference – 28-31 May 2013 – Boston, MA

AnDevCon is the technical conference for software developers building or selling Android apps. It will offer one day of intensive workshops, followed by three days of technical classes. More than 1,000 software developers, engineers and entrepreneurs from 40 nations are projected to attend and choose from 70+ classes to bring Android open source development to a high level. Exhibits admission is free: visit more than 50 exhibitors!

Code MEDIASPONSOR takes $100 off from a 3 or 4-day pass.

HealthXL Global Gathering 2013 — 30 May 2013 — Dublin

The first HealthXL Global Gathering is being held in Dublin. Top investors from around the world are coming together to discuss opportunities in the digital health market, and meet the HealthXL entrepreneurs and mentors. This is more than just a market opportunity. This is a chance to join the sharpest and most exciting investors and thought leaders, and solve some of the biggest issues in healthcare.

Echelon 2013 — 4, 5 June 2013 — Singapore

Echelon 2013 is a two-day tech business event that brings together Southeast Asia’s tech and startup ecosystems. Esteemed speakers are invited to share creative, effective, out-of-the-box thinking to attendees. There will also be 50 hand-picked startups from the Echelon 2013 Satellites to exhibit, dozens of innovative exhibitors and pitching sessions by 10 of this year’s most exciting startups from SEA.

Attendees can expect the coming together of the region’s foremost leaders and players as we discuss where Asia’s tech industry is headed.

Code TNWEchelon2013 takes 10% off from early-bird, regular and door tickets.

Big Business Meets Startup — 6 June 2013 — London

Big Businesses can learn a lot from Startups who work on state of the art technologies and on breakthrough concepts. A lot of these Startups’ innovative solutions are very viable for Big Businesses today. Taking the traditional route of waiting for technology to mature or IT partners to understand it wastes precious time and gives competition the edge.
Enterprise IT decision makers.

Code TNW takes 10% off your purchase.

Velocity Conference — 18-20 June 2013 — Santa Clara, CA

O’Reilly Velocity is much more than a conference; it’s become the essential training event for web operations and development professionals from companies of all sizes. Join hundreds of your peers June 18-20 in Santa Clara, CA for three packed days dedicated to operations, web, and mobile performance.

20% discount to TNW readers when you use code TNW and sign up here.

GEN News Summit – 19-21 June, 2013 – Paris

GEN News Summit isn’t your typical conference. Consisting of a dynamic programme including the Data Journalism Awards, The Drone Journalism Boot Camp, Startups for News, six workshops hosted by the ONA and the Editors Lab Hackathon. Editors-in-chief, newsroom decision-makers, data journalists, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs meet during a three day period to share their expertise on creating a better future for journalism.

AR Summit — 20 June 2013 — London

Now in its 3rd year, this one day conference & expo will provide a unique insight into the capabilities, innovations, successes and future direction of AR. This platform is designed to bring together the industry advocates, leading technology providers and innovative companies/brands looking to discover, explore and embrace the concepts AR brings.

Code TNWFRIEND gives a 20% discount.

DCONF — 27, 28 June 2013 — Milan

DConf 2013, the premiere International event involving key experts and opinion leaders in the area of SaaS (Software As A Service) business solutions.

At DConf 2013, Cloud computing is not a marketing Buzzword. It is instead the trigger behind a unique opportunity to connect face to face with experts, influencers, doers, adopters and business-visionaries in today’s bubbly SaaS arena.

The International guest speakers will share their experiences, success stories, business insights and case studies. Disruptive start-ups, Blue-Chip Corporate executives and financial investors will mesh their how-to’s and challenge the audience with their backgrounds, visions and beliefs.

Digital Domination Summit — 28 June 2013 — Online

Key speakers such as Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin and more will be featured via this online-only event that focuses on doing business in the digital world.

RAMP — 11, 12 July 2013 — Budapest

RAMP is an international tech conference on scaling engineering from 1 to 100 million, held in Budapest, Hungary on 11-12 July 2013.

This conference is for the deeply technical—those in the trenches of scaling systems who handle this kind of exponential growth, with speakers from companies like Yahoo, DropBox, Wrapp or Netflix.

We’ll learn from each other—both what we’ve done well and how we’ve screwed up. The goal is to showcase best practices, warn against potential pitfalls, and learn how to start building systems that will be easy to scale from the beginning.

ITX Asia 2013 will be the 2nd ICT & ERP Trade Exhibition serving Malaysia & the Asian region. It will be a platform of enterprises and the ICT to see the latest ICT showcase and trends as well as a networking avenue congregated in one place. The Industry keeps evolving and continues to captivate the enterprises of its latest innovations. ITX Asia 2013 will serve the purpose of meeting the objectives of participants of mutual interest pertaining to the subject of Information Communication Technology.

Leading In Local: SMB Digital Marketing — 11-13 September, 2013 — Austin,Texas

LEADING IN LOCAL: SMB Digital Marketing is center stage for the fast-changing, exciting SMB marketing solutions space, as digital innovations transform how SMBs attract, retain and upsell their customers. This event is focused on how the sales forces of Yellow Pages, independent sales organizations, search firms, newspapers, TV and radio stations and promotions companies are converging on independent SMBs, franchisees and regional groups.

Code TNW200 takes $200 off registration.

Apps World — 22-23 October 2013 — London

The flagship Apps World show will be returning to London for two days of engagement and high level insight and discussion around one of the largest growing industries – mobile apps. Europe’s largest multi-platform app event will be taking over Earls Court 2 for a massive free-to-attend expo with over 8,000 developers, mobile marketers, mobile operators, platform owners and industry professionals expected.

Code TNW20 saves 20% for TNW readers.

Pioneers Festival — 30/31 October 2013 — Vienna, Austria

Pioneers Festival gathers the tech scene – Startups, Founders, Hackers, Bloggers, VCs and Innovators, in fact the Troublemakers – from all over to inspire and be inspired. Set in the heart of Vienna, at Hofburg Imperial Palace, Pioneers Festival educates, entertains and inspires a new generation of Pioneers.

Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media — 10-12 December, 2013 — San Francisco

BIA/Kelsey’s LEADING IN LOCAL conferences are the definitive events on local digital advertising and marketing. Join us in San Francisco, Dec. 10-12, for LEADING IN LOCAL: Interactive Local Media (formerly ILM West), the original digital media conference focused on the interactive local opportunity. This event has consistently attracted the industry’s most interesting, innovative and inspired leaders for nearly 10 years.

Code TNW200 takes $200 off of your registration price.

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Disclosure: Some links in this article offer a commission payment to The Next Web if you click through and buy tickets.

LeWeb London is just around the corner, and it’s shaping up to be a really interesting couple of days in the UK capital. If you want to be there, we’ve got some good news – we have two passes to give away to two lucky readers and a discount code for the rest of you.

LeWeb London 2013 takes place on 5 and 6 June, and will focus on the theme of ‘The New Sharing Economy’. Speakers taking part in the packed two-day programme will include Google’s Vice President for Northern & Central Europe, Matt Brittin; Facebook’s Head of European Platform Partnerships, Julien Codorniou; Crunchfund’s Michael Arrington; Airbnb co-founder, Joe Gebbia; Yelp co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, and many more.

Meanwhile, 16 teams will present onstage as part of the startup competition.

Two free passes to give away

So, how do you get hold of one of two free passes for the event? Leave a comment below telling us why you’d like to attend. At 1pm London time on Thursday 16 May 2013 we’ll select two winners. Please make sure that your Disqus account has a social media account like Twitter, Facebook or Google+ connected so that we can contact you if you’re selected.

Discount code

If you want to guarantee yourself a place at LeWeb London 2013, use this special link to get a £200 discount on your ticket.

TNW will be represented at LeWeb London 2013 by Robin Wauters and I – we’ll see you there!

Image credit: Thinkstock

Our events team is only just recovering from last month’s sold out TNW Conference Europe and already they’re looking forward to the next big project. On August 28th & 29th 2013, we’re returning to São Paulo for the second edition of The Next Web Conference Latin America.

Last year, our Brazil event saw more than 600 attendees travel to São Paulo for keynotes from international speakers including Werner Vogels (Amazon), Ryan Holiday (American Apparel), Romero Rodrigues (BuscaPé), Andrew Keen (Digital Vertigo), In Hsieh (Baby.com.br), Julio Vasconcellos (Peixe Urbano), Andreas Gal (Mozilla), Nicolas Szekazy (MercadoLibre), Veronica Serra (Pacific Investments) and more.

In August this year, more than 800 online professionals from all over Latin America, the US and Europe will witness talks from more than 15 international tech and Internet experts, learn about the future of the Web and do business with Latin America’s decision makers. Indeed, doing business is an important part of the event; last year, more than $7 million in funding was raised either at or directly after the conference.

Then there are the startups – 20 hot Latin American startups will pitch and announce news on stage as part of the TNW Startup Rally, while an extra 45 will be demoing their products and services in the business area.

So, if you want to join us there, you’d better get registered, right? We’re currently giving out 25 vouchers for 2-for-1 ticket deals. Anyone can apply for a voucher until the 22nd of May, after which official ticket sales will open.

See you in São Paulo!

➤ TNW Conference Latin America

Image credit: Thinkstock

“I have few average days,” says Horace Dediu, one of the most well-respected watchers of the mobile industry, and Apple in particular, when asked about how he fills his time while running the Asymco blog and consultancy.

“Right now it’s 2am and I’m in Australia. If I am at home my work is usually a few hours of reading and email followed by about 2 to 3 hours writing a post. If I have time, I read and look at data. Ideally I would prefer to have a regular schedule but travel is making it impossible.”

Indeed, later this month Dediu’s international speaking schedule takes him to the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead, UK, an event we described last year as “The UK’s answer to TED.” The Next Web is a media partner for the event and we caught up with him to discuss analysts, Apple and emerging markets.

TNW: Some Apple analysts attract derision for, say, predicting an Apple-branded TV that never appears. What makes a good analyst and how are analysts’ predictions different in importance from those of a good tech blogger?

Dediu: Apple analysts vary. If you refer to “sell-side” analysts who are working for financial services companies, their paychecks are not tied to accuracy or foresight. They are sold as a resource to clients of the firm and their work is meant to manage client expectations. They depend on access to management and supply chain managers for any differentiation. It is not a recipe for understanding a company’s resources, processes or priorities.

Another set of analysts are market analysts like Gartner or IDC that try to measure the market or industry. They make fewer predictions about a single company but they too can be forced into a blunder by suggesting that Apple or any other company behaves like any other.

There are other observers who are often more insightful. They are not called analysts because they don’t have that job title. They are bloggers or people who may have worked in the industry and can make informed opinions. They are typically more insightful because they are motivated to provide accurate predictions to establish credibility and reputation with a wide audience who is not expected to pay for their work.

So paradoxically, the opinion of those who are highly paid should be treated with suspicion while the opinion of those subject to peer review should be treated with respect. It brings to mind the difference between highly paid fortune tellers and pundits whose methods are obscure vs. poorly paid graduate students whose methods are open to all. Whose opinion is worth more?”

TNW: There has been much talk recently on the ‘decline’ of Apple, as reflected in its stock price. What’s your take on this ‘decline’ and the suggestions that Tim Cook should be fired?

Dediu: I’ve written about the perception of decline several times. The quick answer is that as Apple has risen, the number of people who have taken it upon themselves to give commentary on how Apple should improve itself has increased. If the increase in commentary is in proportion to Apple’s sales then it has risen ‘exponentially’.

Similar to the notion that half of all Apple users became Apple users last year then perhaps more than half the comments on Apple are from people who never commented on Apple before. Therefore these new comments come from people who did not observe Apple prior to its most recent ascent. Therefore the current dip in share price is the first they’ve ever observed first-hand. They give it disproportionate significance. I’ve pointed out that there have been massive declines in share price in the last decade. Most of them rooted in forgettable reasoning.

“My rule of thumb is that investors should expect a 40% drop in Apple shares at any time and for no reason. Warren Buffet seems to agree. There can be a long discussion about why that is but I think it suffices to say that there are too many institutional owners, and hence too much concentration of homogeneous thought about the company.”

“Anyone suggesting Tim Cook should be fired is a neophyte. This would apply to anyone suggesting the firing of any CEO’s. The process of hiring and firing CEOs is complex, political and varies widely by company and reason.”

TNW: Apple is seeing revenue from China rise despite a relatively modest position in the country’s smartphone market share which Samsung now leads. Would you classify the company’s operations in the country as on the right road for success, or is it under-performing?

Dediu: Apple’s China revenues for Q1 have increased nearly four-fold in two years. China share of Apple’s global revenues more than doubled going from 9% to 19% in the same two years. I’m unsure of what level of performance should be considered good enough but Tim Cook said it will be their biggest market. He should know.”

TNW: At what point do you believe that the majority of people in emerging markets will own smartphones (if at all)? 

Dediu: The question is academic. The more important question is when will mobile broadband be available to all those who own smartphones. The economics of providing bandwidth are out of sync with the economics of providing terminals that can consume it. If it continues this way, all those smartphones will not be used for mobile data and will thus be essentially dumb. (Broadband is only a proxy. Mobile app usage, messaging, mobile media and payments will all have to be served over a broadband network which may not scale.)

“The phenomenon of ownership without usage was all too common years ago when Symbian and BlackBerry dominated smartphone share. The result was a lack of “stickiness” of ecosystems and a wholesale replacement when alternatives were presented.”

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Horace Dediu will be talking about the future of computing at Thinking Digital, a conference we described last year as “The UK’s answer to TED.” The conference takes place on 21-23 May 2013 in Gateshead and other speakers include Facebook’s Maria Giudice;  Aza Raskin, VP of Design at Jawbone; UX designer, Aral Balkan and the BBC’s Maggie Philbin.

The final few tickets are available now.

Image credit: AppWorks2012 / Flickr

At last week’s The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, Liam Boogar from TNW media partner Rude Baguette moderated a panel discussion on ‘Hyper Growth from Europe’ with a pair of Swedish entrepreneurs, SoundCloud co-founder Alex Ljung and Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth. You can find the video recording of the discussion below.

Ljung traveled back to the early days of SoundCloud, during which he and his co-founder Eric Wahlforss decided that they wouldn’t start building the company out of Sweden to ‘avoid distractions’.

Instead, they did a little tour around Europe (more specifically Vienna, Barcelona, London and Berlin) and during the final one-day stop in the German capital decided to settle there because the ‘vibe was so good’ and they felt Berlin was right at the intersection of art and technology.

He amusingly says SoundCloud is thus ‘European by choice’, although he admittedly spends half his time in the company’s offices in San Francisco.

Be that as it may, Ljung and Wahlforss picked up the first Europioneer award for ‘European Entrepreneur of the Year’ the day before this panel.

Adalberth started Klarna with the company’s other co-founders in Stockholm, Sweden, because, he says, the barrier for starting a business was high enough as it was (they were in business school at the time and didn’t really know all that much about the technology industry).

Interestingly, Adalberth commented on how Klarna was initially focused on Sweden for new business, but gradually expanded internationally by essentially “following their customers’ needs”.

SoundCloud went completely global from day one, Ljung says in contrast, albeit in a “less intensive way”.

Both Klarna and SoundCloud went on to become global leaders in their respective fields though, and you should watch the rest of the discussion below if you’d like to learn how they went about it.

Catch up with the rest of our coverage from TNW Conference 2013.

Top image credit: Thinkstock

Body image credit: Juliadeboer.com for TNW2013 / Flickr

As we quickly approach the start of GLUE Conference 2013, I wanted to take a minute to sit down with one of GLUE’s keynote speakers, Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix. Since GLUE is all about the ties that bind when it comes to the Internet (cloud, APIs, backends, full-stack development, et al.) it made sense to talk to one of Netflix’s Cloud Architects about how the company has changed as it has grown.

Cockcroft spoke at last year’s GLUE as well, where he filled a half-day tutorial class on cloud architecture to the point of having to turn folks away. But, according to Cockcroft, what he was really speaking about was the abstract architecture of Netflix in some detail, as the company hadn’t finished implementing all of the code. This year, his keynote and tutorial will focus on the practical details about the code and how to use it.

For Netflix, the best way to get others to get involved is by taking the open-source approach. Since Netflix itself was using open-source code from Cassandra, and contributing fixes to it, the company was already comfortable within the open-source community. Toward the end of 2011, the company began contributing standalone projects such as Curator and ZooKeeper.

As time has moved on, the benefits of living within open-source have continued to push Netflix in its use of the platforms. For Cockcroft, those benefits can be narrowed down into four key areas:

• Validation of Approach — The code is extended, and made better, when other pople work on it.
• Contribution Ecosystem — The community finds bugs, and it builds what Netflix didn’t think of itself.
• Quality Control — Open source is, simply, better quality code.
• The People — Applicants to the company already understand its architecture, making Netflix a better place to work.

We talked a bit as well about Netflix’s reliance on AWS. For Cockcroft, despite the occasional problems, it’s still a better option than hosting via datacenters and in fact he states that the problems are still the same. The advantage, of course, is that provisioning takes minutes instead of weeks. Beyond that, however, there’s the fact that it’s now easier for Netflix to do one-off projects.

Netflix’s redundancy focuses on deploying everything to three different copies, in different time zones and buildings. While we have taken a look at the Chaos Monkey, Cockcroft tells me that there’s a bigger threat in the company’s internal tool dubbed The Chaos Gorilla. While the Monkey may take out one or two services, the Gorilla will actually take down an entire zone.

“Every time we do that, we find something that is not quite right; a weakness or a bug. You can test to pass or you can test to fail. We make sure that we push our systems into failure so that we know how they react.”

So what’s next for Netflix? We’re told that the company will continue to push itself toward failure mitigation on a regional level. The goal is to have a 50/50 split of Netflix services, from coast to coast in the US, so that when the next Hurricane Sandy hits, Netflix customers won’t feel an impact on their services. The company is also awarding prizes for contributing to its open-source platform. There are 10 prizes at $10,000 each, and all of the code is readily available on the Netflix Github site. So far over 700 people have forked the project, and the winner will be chosen in December.

Cockcroft is only one of 13 keynote speakers at GLUE, and that’s not to mention the breakouts, tracks and workshops that will be available, included within the cost of your ticket. If you’re one of the people who build the Internet, then there’s positively no conference that will provide more information than GLUE. Come, join us in Broomfield as we talk about what folks will call bleeding edge two years from now. Transport yourself into the future, and let’s build something amazing.

Use code TNW321 for 10% off of your registration. 

Image: AFP/Stringer / Getty Images

For the third year in a row, TNW will be headed to Nebraska. Omaha, to be exact, and the Big Omaha conference. As we’ve called it in the past, it’s the most important conference that you’ve never attended, and we’re thrilled to have the chance to return as a media partner once again.

Big Omaha is unlike any conference that you’ve attended, in that it’s not necessarily as much about technology and entrepreneurship as it is about the life lessons that can be learned from working within these fields. My first year there, I heard Micah Baldwin tell his heart-wrenching story about a life filled with money, drugs and what happens when you forgive more often than you should. Shervin Pishevar spoke about the power of mentorship, and what it takes to overcome.

I got warm, fuzzy feelings…and then I went home.  I sat in my house, trying to figure out why I suddenly felt like I was a kid who had just been pulled away from summer camp, and I realized that I had been changed. My outlook on my world, both personally and professionally, had been impacted in a way that is nearly impossible to put into words. What I can say, however, is that I was challenged to become a better person.

Going back to Omaha in 2012, I realized that not only was it an amazing group of speakers, but there was also a sense of community unlike any conference I’d been to before. I have a group of friends, from San Francisco, New York and Boulder, and we all meet up in Omaha. If SXSW is geek spring break, then Big Omaha is the family reunion you’ll actually want to attend.

This year, we’re converging again. We’ll eat amazing sushi (yes, in Nebraska), we’ll listen to speakers and be challenged again, and we’ll all leave with that “see you next year” attitude that Big Omaha instills in its attendees. Once you’ve been, you will come back. It becomes almost instinctive.

But why Omaha? That’s a great question, which I tried to answer in a longer piece that I wrote after my first year there. But the gist of the matter is this — The Silicon Prairie. It’s a massive chunk of land, with five cities forming a border consisting of Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City, Sioux City and Lincoln. While the challenges of a startup community being this geographically large are daunting, the Prairie is doing some amazing things. A quick glance over to our friends at Silicon Prairie News (the creators of Big Omaha) will give you an indication.

So yes, we’ll be going back for Big Omaha 2013 — the fifth year of the conference. If history has any say in things, we’ll be there next year as well. You should too. I will say again, without any amount of hyperbole, that Big Omaha is a life-changing experience. Please, come find out why.

Image: brianweise via Flickr

Few tech events have made as big an impact in as short a time as the Dublin Web Summit. 2013 will be only its fourth year and its now evolving from a conference into what the organisers are calling “a festival of ideas and events.”

The Summit is expected to attract 6,000 people this year as big name speakers descend on the Irish capital. The first names to be announced are: Evernote CEO Phil Libin; tech investor Esther Dyson; Digg founder turned Google Ventures VC Kevin Rose; WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg; blogger turned investor Ben Parr; Hailo co-founder, Jay Bregman; Eugene Kaspersky of Kaspersky Labs; Rina Onur of Peak Games, and Rent The Runway founder, Jennifer Hyman.

So, what can you expect from the new, festival-like Web Summit? Founder Paddy Cosgrave says that it will be a SXSW-style affair featuring workshops, pitching sessions and keynotes over more than three days. The main Summit itself will take place on 30-31 October 2013.

The Web Summit began in 2010 as a one-day conference. The team behind it has grown significantly over the past year, with 40 full-time staff (30 more than a year ago) handling events in Dublin, London, Berlin and New York.

The Next Web is a media partner for the Dublin Web Summit, and we’re looking forward to being there again this year – it’s always a welcoming, engaging and rewarding experience.

Tickets for the Dublin Web Summit will be on sale soon, but you can apply for a 2-for-1 ticket voucher right now on the website.

➤ Dublin Web Summit

Image credit: Thinkstock

It’s all happening in Amsterdam this week. In addition to our conference on Thursday and Friday, and the Europioneers ceremony on Wednesday, others have scheduled events in the city too. European accelerator Startupbootcamp is currently on a world tour to meet startups and see them pitch. On Wednesday, it hits the Dutch capital.

The idea of these pitch days are that they’re private sessions where startups can get straight and honest feedback from experienced entrepreneurs and investors on their pitch and company.

The Next Web is a media partner for the tour and will be attending some of the pitch days to give feedback to the startups taking part. As Amsterdam is our home city, expect to see us on the panel there this week!

If you’d like to apply, can do so via f6s – the deadline for Amsterdam is tonight, so be quick! Only the best will be selected.

Of course, Startupbootcamp is looking for startups to take part in its accelerator programs, too. In recent notable news, its Berlin program  announced a partnership with Mercedes-Benz, HDI and Bosch. Co-founder Alex Farcet says that the partnership “will enable startups (on) the Berlin program to have a global impact on innovation, particularly in the following three areas: Connectivity, Mobility and Big Data. We hope to find them at TNW Conference.”

Upcoming pitch days across Europe are as follows: Amsterdam (24 April), Lisbon (4 May), Barcelona (8 May), Frankfurt (8 May), Athens (9 May), Copenhagen (14 May), Berlin Online West (16 May), Berlin Online East (21 May), Berlin (23 May), Hamburg (25 May), Helsinki (28 May), Stuttgart (29 May), Oslo (30 May), Stockholm (31 May).

➤ Startupbootcamp

Image credit: Thinkstock

This summer, LeWeb’13 is returning to London with some of the most influential people from around the internet world. The theme for the event is ‘The New Sharing Economy’, or what some people refer to as ‘collaborative consumption’.

As you would expect from LeWeb, the line up is exceptional with speakers such as Joe Gabbia, Airbnb co-founder, Chad Dickerson, CEO Etsy, and Matt Brittin, President, Northern and Central Europe, Google, to name just a few.

The LeWeb’13 speakers and delegates in attendance will be chewing over all the hot topics, debates and dilemmas bubbling to the surface of the industry right now. They will also be exploring the impact some of the latest startups are having, as they disrupt business models such as public transportation through to hospitality.

Typical of all great events like LeWeb, the opportunities to network with fellow industry professionals and perhaps meet groups from exciting niche areas, is huge. In addition, you will get to meet the finalists for this years Startup Competition.

Naturally, The Next Web will be in attendance reporting across the two days, with Robin Wauters, TNW European Editor speaking at the event as well. We will bring you the latest news and goings on, as it happens.

LeWeb’13 takes place in London on June 5th and 6th. Registration for tickets is open now.

Image Credit: Thinkstock