Piece in Wired: “Dublin Web Summit highlights the under-reported successes of Irish tech”

Following on from my previous piece in Wired UK on the optimism at the Pub Summit, this piece takes a macro snapshot of the Dublin startup scene during last week’s Web Summit. See  Web Summit story on Wired UK here, or read on below..

Last Friday was a big tech day for Dublin. Web game giant Zynga kicked things off by launching its European HQ in Dublin, and disclosed plans to build the city into its biggest operations centre. Across town the sixth Dublin Web Summit opened its doors to 1,000 young developers, serial entrepreneurs, marketers, and investors.

Paddy Cosgrave, who organises the Summit, reckons that Dublin beats London for density of entrepreneurial tech activity per capita. The Dublin Web Summit is now one of the bigger

Frederick Taylor, DEC, and Zynga: how does “idea fuel” filter to the top of perpetual beta organisations?

I broke bread with the speakers after the Dublin Web Summit on Friday (see my coverage of the Summit for Wired UK), and sat opposite Marcus Segal, Zynga’s Chief Operating Officer for Games. Segal is faced with a hell of a problem: Zynga is growing like a super nova, and the model it uses relies on trying out new ideas all the time. It needs idea fuel.

Zynga needs a good flow of idea fuel particularly badly because it embraces the “perpetual beta” approach, keeping its products in a stage of change and development at all time and testing new ideas on a weekly basis. (on perpetual beta – see chap. 10 of  A history of the Internet and the digital future). So the question is, when you have a big, rapidly growing company, how do you get the brain juice to flow upward from all levels of staff – and how do you filter the quality?

When Frederick Taylor, the father of management consulting