Held in person for the first time in two years, Luxembourg’s leading tech conference hosted by Farvest got off to a great start. Silicon Luxembourg was there to report on the first day of the conference’s 13th edition.
For over a decade the international ICT Spring conference has occupied an important position in Luxembourg’s tech scene. Formerly a pure fintech event, this year’s conference, themed Beyond Frontiers, expanded its focus to include topics such as the metaverse, cybersecurity, AI, spacetech and much more.
Although the event has expanded its focus, the digital transformation of society and businesses remains a core priority, at least for economy minister Fanz Fayot. In his speech, he reiterated the importance of Luxembourg’s twin policies of digitalisation and sustainability, especially against the current “gloomy backdrop” of the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, inflation and the climate crisis.
While digitalisation remains of utmost importance for Luxembourg, Fayot cautioned to “not mistake means with ends,” especially considering today’s “VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) climate”.
Calling that digitalisation “a tool” and the green transition “an objective”, the minister reminded the attendees that digital solutions should “reduce rather than increase our energy use” and that we should carefully consider which projects had public value and which were only about private entertainment.
Unpacking The Metaverse
Of course, the metaverse was a hot topic on the first day too. Mike Butcher, Editor-at-large of TechCrunch started off the metaverse talks, attempting to unpack this topic which has garnered so much attention and confusion in recent months.
While many are still sceptical about the metaverse, Meta, the company spearheading the movement, is doing everything in its power to realise the metaverse. “One-fifth of Meta’s employees now work on the metaverse and they are losing $3 billion per quarter to work out what this next interface is going to look like,” points out Butcher.
While the valuation of the metaverse remains a topic of debate and “people are plucking figures out of the air to put a value on it,” none of the speakers at the event seemed to doubt its potential.
New skills will be required and the bumps ahead will be plenty, but as Butcher put it, “there is no smoke without fire”. Marc Carrel-Billiar, Global Technology Innovation and Labs Lead at Accenture, is just as optimistic.
Somewhere between firmly with his feet on the ground and in the metaverse was Bastien Didier, Founder and Chairman of Mentalista, a startup operating at the fringes of brain-environment interfaces.
Taking a more practical approach to the standard tech conference presentation, he had two volunteers play a game of football using only their brainwaves. The future is now.
Rise Of New Work
Bringing the attendees back to Terra Firma was Google’s Chief Workspace Evangelist Michael Brenzel. Quoting Harvard’s latest research, he said that 80% of employees would like to have at least 2 days of remote work.
Keen to accommodate their employees’ wishes, Google has followed Harvard’s findings and even given some of their employees the possibility to work 100% remotely, if the position allowed. “But this does not mean that they can work from the beach,” Brenzel was quick to add.
According to Google’s brightest, the rise of new work is here to stay and will center around the four pillars of productivity, connectedness, well-being and flexibility. Bye bye 9-5, hello flexible and remote working.
In other office-space related news, Benjamin Tiller, Daniel Schneider and Robert Glaesener live launched their new office rental platform Fiveoffices, prompting comparisons to another famous rental platform.
The Future Of Tech
As the afternoon sun was turning up the heat inside the Luxexpo, Emmanuel Moyrand, VP at Meta France and CEO of AzteQ, Serge Linckels, director of the MENJE and Christina Angelillo, CEO and co-founder of Marshmallow Games were discussing how to create the tech leaders of tomorrow.
Continued education with a heavy focus on IT and technology and innovative learning solutions seem key. According to Serge Linckels, Luxembourg has already made considerable progress in this respect, “trippling the number of graduates in the last three years” and opening the Digital Learning Hub.
Closing off the conference at the main stage was Jean Rognetta, Editor-at-Large at Le Nouvel Economiste. Listing generative adversarial network (GAN), natural language processing (NLP), extended reality (XR) and blockchain as the four top tech drivers of the decade, he said that one of the main challenges in the future would be “to differentiate the real video from the fake video”.
“With NLP AI we are going towards a future with machines that can read and write as well as humans,” added Rognetta. While he failed to mention how this would impact the role of the journalist, he concluded that all of these changes would take place in something called the mediaverse.
What exactly this will look like remains unclear. What seems certain, however, is that by the end of the decade technology will be so ingrained in our daily lives that it will be hard to distinguish where the real begins and the virtual ends.
