Viva Technology: An even bigger success for 2017!

2017 showcased even more innovations, more prestigious partners and more inspiring people from the global tech scene. Viva Technology has, for its second edition, exceeded its objectives and successfully positions France a major hub for tech start-ups and innovation worldwide.

Viva Technology, the global technology event, dedicated to innovation, has met the challenge to do even better than its previous year. Over 60,000 visitors attended Viva Technology over the three days, (the first two days were dedicated to professionals with the last day opening its doors to the public) and have met with 6,000 startups, 1,500 investors and thousands of executives from around the world.

In addition, Viva Technology was honoured to welcome the President of the Republic of France, Emmanuel Macron, who declared: “France is becoming the nation for startups and must succeed in this challenge”.  

Macron was joined by a number of other well-known politicians and officials from the French government including: Bruno Lemaire, Minister for the Economy, Elisabeth Borne, Transport Minister, Muriel Pénicaud, Labour Minister, Frédérique Vidal, Education Minister, Mounir Mahjoubi, Secretary of State in charge of Digital, Marlène Schiappa, Secretary of State in charge of Gender Equality, Valérie Pécresse, President of the Ile de France region and Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris.

The home of worldwide game changers

Over the three days Viva Technology played host to the biggest digital players in the world. Throughout the 250+ conferences, 500+ entrepreneurial leaders, CEOs, investors and researchers discussed many off the key issues surrounding the impact of digital on the world’s economies and societies. Bernard Arnault (LVMH), Jean-Laurent Bonnafé (BNP Paribas), John Chambers (Cisco), John Collison (Stripe), Paul Eremenko (Airbus), Jeffrey R. Immelt (GE), David Kenny (IBM Watson & Cloud Platform), Isabelle Kocher (ENGIE), SY Lau (Tencent), Emily Leproust (Twist Bioscience), Yuri Milner (DST Global),  Ambarish Mitra (Blippar), Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed), Prof. Bertrand Piccard (Solar Impulse), Kira Radinsky (ebay), Carlo Ratti (MIT Senseable city Lab), Oliver Samwer (Rocket Internet), Eric Schmidt (Alphabet Inc), Joe Schoendorf (Accel Partners) Adam Singolda (Taboola), Yossi Vardi (Entrepreneur de l’Internet Israélien), Eleanor Watson (Singularity University), Philippe Wahl (Groupe La Poste), Mark Weinberger (EY), Yuanqing Yang (Lenovo Group) and Daniel Zhang (Alibaba Group) were just some of the special guests who graced the Viva Technology halls to discuss these important issues.  

Our top 10 talks from some of these icons at the conference included:   

• China at the forefront,
• AI and Big Data,
• What’s next for FinTech?,
• Will robots take our jobs,
• Virtual and augmented: moving towards a different reality?
• Mobility as a service,
• Media and advertising: the challenge of the truth,
• IoT,
• Startups: how to accelerate?
• The active energy revolution,
• The ‘next tech’

Where they divulged their predictions for the future and discussed many of the emerging trends at the moment.

Viva Technology also created the platform for 20 industry-focused labs, whereby the biggest leaders in industry, geared towards real open-innovation such as BNP Paribas, La Poste, Orange and LVMH supported  collaborations with more than 1,000 startups. Incubations, prototype financing, mentoring and investments have all been initiated as a result.  

Within the Hall of Tech, visitors discovered the latest innovations, set to transform business and impact our day-to-day life. Exhibitors included the likes of Google, Facebook, IBM Watson, Alibaba and Lenovo. As well as many innovative startups, such as Histovery for an immersive visit of patrimony in augmented reality, Buddy the family robot by BlueFrogs, Navya driverless shuttle and H3 Dynamics drones.

Maurice Lévy, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Publicis Groupe said about Viva Technology: “I sincerely thank all those who helped us confirm that Paris is at the heart of the digital world, from our partners who believed in this event, the startups that this whole event is dedicated to and all the speakers who supported us along the way. I also want to acknowledge the teams, who, under the supervision of Julie Ranty and Maxime Baffert, Co-Directors of Viva Technology have accomplished such a success, with a special mention for Publicis Events. Finally, I really want to recognise and commend our collaboration with Les Echos Group, Francis Morel and his teams”.  

Francis Morel, CEO of Groupe Les Echos added: “With this latest edition of Viva Technology we have confirmed that it is a truly exemplar event for innovation in Europe. We have succeeded in creating concrete collaborations between startups and big corporates – which is exactly what we set out to do, and the figures confirm that our results are way beyond our ambitions. We are happy to announce that we will obviously renew this formidable experience in 2018”.

What you missed if you weren’t able to attend Viva Technology 2017:

• 100 of the most inspiring innovations such as humanoid robots of Engineered Arts, the l Go Touch VR glove that allowed users to really feel objects in virtual reality, next generation drones, such as Staaker, the most advanced uses of AI with Google Assistant, a 3D printing of urban furniture (Bouygues Construction) ; a model of the Solar Impulse, the autonomous car presented by Cisco and Valeo, and SeaBubble’s latest prototype.
• Over 450 one-to-one meetings between startups and investors from around the world (more than 70 investment funds, 60% from abroad).
• Ten drone races on the Longchamps Hippodrome organised by PMU for the public, where drones were piloted over 5km.  
• A 25 hour Deep Tech Hackathon, which brought together more than 200 developers and 50 mentors from 8 different countries.
• The first edition of the LVMH Innovation Awards won by Heuritechdata. The award was presented by Bernard Arnault, Chairman & CEO of LVMH himself.