On 2-4 October at Arena Lviv Stadium held Lviv IT Arena Conference. It was visited by hundreds of IT-professionals, top-managers, designers, investors, entrepreneurs and startuppers. They all visited the conference to discuss main trends in IT sphere.
This year’s three-day conference Lviv IT Arena 2015 brought together unexpectedly large number of participants. Organizers expected about 1200 participants, but it was visited by more than 1400. This is almost twice more than on the first year of the conference, when the event was attended by 800 participants.
During the Grand Opening of the Conference spoke Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi and Head of Lviv Regional State Administration Oleg Synyutka. The keynote speaker of the conference was Member of Parliament and co-founder of Eleks company – Oleksiy Skrypnyk. His speech was devoted to the vision of Ukraine of New Generation.
Conference was divided into 3 thematic streams: Product, Technology and Business. Participants had an opportunity to listen speakers from USA, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Estonia, Russia, Poland, Belarus and of course Ukraine. During conference held 9 workshops for designers, PMs, entrepreneurs and lawyers. Speeches could be conducted in English,Russian and Ukrainian languages.
At Product Stream participants of Lviv IT Arena 2015 had an opportunity to listen to Program Director of IBM Design – Greger Ottosson, who spoke about how design thinking is transforming product development at his company. Also among speakers were: experienced Tom Gilb, Matthias Langholz and Heike van Geel from SAP, Yuriy Vetrov from Mail.ru, Valera Vasylenko from FitBit and Alex Neskin from Petcube. Product Stream prepared interesting speeches and workshops for designers, PMs and programmers, which they could visit before, during and even after the conference.
At Technology Stream Software Engineer from Facebook – Ostap Korkuna talked about how engineers test their software in his company. Dr. Ruslana Radchuk from Leibniz-Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Germany spoke about eBiology: Bioinformatics, Systems Biology, Computational Biology and -omics. Sergey Poplavskyi from Microsoft Ukraine told how to Build Your Strategy and Projections with Azure Machine Learningeight lines of very common code.
Business Stream brought together entrepreneurs, startuppers and everyone who is keen on IT business. Denis Dovgopoliy from GrowthUP Group talked about latest trend in tech business. Nelu Mihai Founder of MosaixSoft, Inc. shared interesting ideas on how current challenges in Ukraine may become catalyst for technology innovation. Managing Director of Luxoft Vitaliy Nuzhnyy speech was devoted to development of economy and talent in IT industry. He also told that IT in Ukraine reached 3% of GDP. CEO of Lviv IT Cluster Stepan Veselovskyi talked about results of unique analytical research of the entire Lviv IT market with high representativeness. SoftServe Co-Founder Taras Kytsmey spoke about lessons, which were learned while working in non-outsourcing directions.
Except the speakers reports there was a lot of entertainment for the guests. On the first day of Lviv IT Arena the race of legendary Tesla against Ford Mustang, Mercedes G500 AMG and BMW S1000R motorcycle took place. Only the motorcycle turned out to be quicker than Tesla.
Also during the conference Lviv IT Cluster initiated the first meeting of Ukrainian clusters. The meeting was attended by representatives of Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, Lutsk and Cherkasy clusters. They discussed future cooperation and possible vectors of development.
On 3rd of October Lviv IT Cluster celebrated its 5th anniversary. Co-founders and friends congratulated community with small triumph. City Mayor Andriy Sadovyi promised to provide 10 hectares of land for new projects of Lviv IT Cluster and Lviv programmers for free. Also Head of Lviv Regional State Administration Oleg Synyutka gave Cluster official permissions for building IT House.
On October 2-3, within Lviv IT Arena 2015 was held an exhibition of robots and modern IT developments – Hi-tech Expo. Participants had an opportunity to pilot drones, experience glasses of virtual reality and interact with legendary NAO robot.
On the last day of the conference participants could acquaint themselves with 13 young and thriving startups during Startup Competition and young entrepreneurs competed for 5,000 dollars in the Amazon Cloud Service and for participation in Traction Camp.
Final day of the conference was full of pleasant surprises and exciting speeches. Main event of the closing ceremony was TNMK concert. After the concert participants could continue party in 3 different clubs.
The organizers believe that such a large-scale event has proved Lviv as the capital of Ukrainian IT industry. But they don’t want to stop on this achievement and promise to surprise the participants with even greater event in 2016.
In general, three-day conference Lviv IT Arena 2015 brought together over 1,400 participants from the US, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, Romania, Greece, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Italy, Poland, Russia and the Netherlands. Over 80% of participants attended the conference for the first time. According to the survey, conducted during the conference, average age of the participants was 27 years. 63.5% of the audience were men, 36.5% – women.
For more details visit itarena.lviv.ua
Posted by Orysia Khimiak