Yesterday concluded the second day of the Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland. Nest Labs CEO and founder Tony Fadell announced a deal that provides customers with a free Nest thermostat by signing a two year utility contract with Electric Ireland. Being the first of several similar deals to come, this means that for consumers the cost of getting Nest will be subsidized by utility companies. Nest is operating independently from Google and as Tony Fadell claims, it’s not sharing data with Google.
OnePlus One sales have reached half a million as revealed by OnePlus One founder and director Carl Pei. The low price, high specs smartphone is sold only by invitation. Pei mentioned that OnePlus One is making a single-figure dollar amount per phone and that even though this is not the way they will make money in the future, it’s their current revenue stream.
Getty Images CEO, Jonathan Klein argued that he can never see a world where intellectual property is free. Getty Images self-disrupted itself as the company started back in the print photography age. Back then, a user had to wait up to seven weeks before they could take their images. Nowadays, company sells 105 million images per year online.
Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture pointed out that by 2020 there will be 50 billion digital devices around the world. This means that the Internet Of Things will dwarf the mobile industry in the near future. Meanwhile, Jeff Hagins, Founder & CTO of SmartThings criticized the lack of standards in IoT communication and asked for an open source language for local and remote access to devices.
Finally, Twitter President of Revenue, Adam Bain dismissed concerns about Twitter’s business model, saying Twitter “was just getting started”. Twitter is diversifying its revenue streams between advertising, data services and a new, currently in Beta, e-commerce function. Twitter came to an agreement with IBM to allow IBM to use Twitter’s data in their enterprise tools and consulting services. This gives IBM access to “the largest set of public conversations available” by Twitter’s account.
284 million unique users use the site monthly and 600 million visit the site on a monthly basis. The new e-commerce product is hoping to bridge the gap between tweeting about a product and buying that product. By adding click-to-buy functionality Twitter hopes to prove that it can be a place that people buy products in addition to discussing about them.
