Paddy Cosgrave issues app-ology

Paddy Cosgrave spends a lot of time telling everyone about what makes the Web Summit different from other tech conferences. The Web Summit hires physicists with PhDs, whereas other conference companies hire event managers, is one such nugget.

The Web Summit founder is an expert at gaining publicity for himself and his endeavours. He is particularly fond of being in the media eye and is a regular fixture in photocalls, so you’d think such a media- savvy operator would know better than to claim credit in an interview for work he didn’t do.

In the recent interview, he said the Web Summit team takes a different approach to organising conferences, trying to build as much of the software it can in-house.

He said he had built the ticketing app – Tito – used by the tech conference and went on to say the app is used by dozens of conferences around the world, like XOXO and Brooklyn Beta. All very good, except Cosgrave didn’t build that app. It was developed by Paul Campbell, Doc Parsons and their team.

XOXO conference organiser Andy McMillan took to Twitter to highlight how Cosgrave was telling people he’d built Tito and his team’s proprietary XOXO registration. “He’s lying and taking credit for other people’s work,” McMillan tweeted.

Cosgrave later took to the Web Summit blog to issue a rare apology, which he later linked to in a tweet.

“I claimed credit for the work of Paul, Doc, their team and Andy Baio & Andy McMillan and their team. For this, I apologise.”

That wasn’t all though, with Cosgrave also holding up his hands to previous transgressions. “I owe Paul and his team more than one apology, having taking credit on a handful of occasions for an awesome product that is of their making,” he said.