It’s all about the selling at expanded Web Summit

He might be the world's worst water salesman, but Enda Kenny has a distinct flair for touting Ireland as the most business-friendly little country in the world.

At the opening day of the Web Summit yesterday, the Taoiseach took to the centre stage of the RDS Simmonscourt just after lunchtime to ring the opening bell of the Nasdaq technology stock exchange in New York. His audience though numbered far in excess of the few thousand in the auditorium – the event was also being broadcast on the curved wall of Nasdaq’s curved New York MarketSite Tower, meaning Kenny’s visage loomed over Times Square as he extolled the virtues of our recovery.

These are the sort of events in which Kenny has few peers, adding a judicious dose of Mayo tweeness as he projected an image abroad of Ireland as the plucky little country that could, and now he had the added line that we are "Europe's fastest-growing economy".

Alongside him on the crowded podium ringing the bell was Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave, justifiably proud at the scene before him – never, he assured us, could he have imagined how big this event would grow so fast.

In true tech fashion, the Nasdaq bell is a flat screen rather than anything so antediluvian as a bell, or a buzzer, or even a button. As a result, despite Pat Kenny leading a new year's style countdown to the opening of the day's trading, the actual ringing process lacked a certain dramatic pizzazz.

In his remarks, however, the Taoiseach managed to get to the heart of what makes the Web Summit tick – it’s all about selling.

From the large stands in the main arena representing the conference partners, projecting their prestige to the world, to the thousands of hopeful exhibitors, advertising their ideas and potential to anyone who will pay them a passing moment’s attention, it is the art of selling that animates the entire event.

Then there is Cosgrave himself, who has sold his vision of a technology conference so successfully that it has grown from a gathering of just 400 in 2010 to this year’s sprawling three-day event, which has attracted more than 20,000 attendees and which seems to cover half of Ballsbridge, stretching from the Food Summit tents in the middle of Herbert Park to the main RDS arena and across to the Simmonscourt.

This year, the summit has strived to encompass more than just the traditional technology industry, adding stages devoted to music and sports, two fields increasingly shaped by their embrace of technology. The move rather cannily increases the appeal of the conference without, amazingly, diluting the summit’s core purpose.

Thus, even the somewhat incongruous sight of Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria (left) sprinkling some celebrity magic dust over proceedings begins to make a certain degree of sense, attracting attention from the US news networks as well as raising a pulse in the venue.

That rapid pace of expansion, however, has led to some inevitable growing pains, and not just with the notoriously unreliable wifi which once again failed to hold up under the pressure, a significant embarrassment for all concerned.

Dividing itself between the RDS main arena and the Simmonscourt pavilion has led to a rather bifurcated affair, as if two parallel events decided to pitch up in the neighbourhood at the same time.

At the current rate of growth, entire Dublin postal areas will be hosting the summit in no time.

While the scale might be slightly bewildering, it ensures there are innumerable highlights – from young John Collison from Co Limerick discussing the challenges of building pioneering payments platform Stripe with his brother Patrick in San Francisco to the rather more mature John Sculley talking about how he didn't, actually, fire Steve Jobs from Apple back in the 1980s.

There was also any number of fascinating talks, lectures and discussions offering insight and inspiration.

Many of those talks by successful entrepreneurs serve to validate the dreams of those budding entrepreneurs outside – dream big, fail fast, sell your vision. With two more days of this year’s conference, there is a lot more dream-building, and selling, to go at this summit.