YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim to take the stage at Dublin Web Summit

2 Oct 2012

Jawed Karim, co-founder of YouTube

Web extravaganza Dublin Web Summit is to include YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim in its line-up on 17 October.

Karim co-founded YouTube in 2005 with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley and the company was bought 18 months later for US$1.6bn. After Google, YouTube is officially the second-largest search engine on the planet.

Karim will join a judging panel of entrepreneurs and investors at the Electric Ireland Spark of Genius competition, which will see 100 start-ups pitch on two stages, with 12 semi-finalists advancing to the morning of 18 October and finally four battling it out.

Skype founder Niklas Zennström has become a familiar face at the conference and for the third year in a row will return to join a line-up that includes Digg founder Kevin Rose, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, Moshi Monsters’ Michael Acton Smith, internet activist Wael Ghonim and Victoria Ransom, who sold Wildfire to Google for US$450m.

Last year, Microsoft bought Skype for US$8.5bn. Zennström remains an active tech investor, backing Rovio, Fab and taxi app Hailo through his London-based venture capital firm Atomico.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com