Consumer Summit part 6: Summit plenary

The programme for the second day of the Summit contained a plenary consisting of four keynote speeches and two panel discussions, leading on from the two workshops that had taken place on Wednesday.

At the beginning of the plenary session, we watched a video message from Mr. Barroso, the President of the European Commission. Unfortunately, he was not able to be present at the Summit in person due to a G20 meeting in London at the same time.

The first speech, about the digital strategy for consumers, was given by Commissioner Kuneva. Mr. Esko Aho, a former Prime minister of Finland and now a board member of Nokia, then talked about innovation, about how businesses need to adapt to the new digital environment. Dr. Colette Bowe, Cairman of Ofcom - the regulator and competition authority of the communication industries in the UK - talked about what digitalisation in Europe means for consumers and what it can bring them. Mr. Nikesh Arora, senior vice-president of Google, told us about future expectations and current developments on the relationshop of the consumers and the internet.

The first panel in the early afternoon discussed mostly data collection and advertisement targeting and profiling, as well as a few other digital challenges. The second panel's main goal was to give the panellists the opportunity to learn from experiences of others in using information technologies, especially in government and non-government organisations that took part on the Summit.

The fairs continued on Thursday, but as you can see from the pictures, they were a little more empty than the previous day, mostly because people had to catch their planes.

The Summit ended with a closing speech of Commissioner Kuneva at around 16:30.

There was no time to spare, so me, Mr. Večl, Mr. Tichota, and Ms. Skřivánková then took a bus to the airport and flew back to Prague.

There seemed to be a lot of people that needed to get back from Brussels to Prague on Thursday evening. The Czech airlines flight was sold out completely and Brussels airlines had to replace their planned Avro jet with a much bigger Boeing 737-400 - and even that one was almost fully seated. We landed in Prague at around 21:00 and went home to get some well-deserved sleep - and to prepare us for the next morning.