On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners Lee, Mr Engida recalled the synergies between the Forum and the ambitions and mandate of UNESCO:  “it is not technology that  can change the world [but rather] the use that we make of it”, he said.

The Grand Prix of this edition was awarded to WIBBITZ, an Israeli start-up which has developed an innovative application to quickly transform any text article into a short video (and audio) news less than 2 minutes long.

Netexplo's award Click & Walk, a service proposed by a French firm, uses a new “crowd-walking” scheme for visualizing and analyzing data captured by a network of 90,000 users for quick micro-surveys for brands and distribution chains, revealing sources and data until now largely unexplored. Conversely, the awarded project Shodan puts in place an innovative search engine identifying 1,5 billion connected objects worldwide.

Many new services are used to model and break the barriers of space in ways which were impossible until now: for example Netexplo's award winner Digital Lollipop, developed by the National University of Singapore allows the transmission of taste on the tongue by means of electrical impulses.

The body is more and more seen by technology as a data-source, and has become the object of surveillance and monitoring through different kinds of devices. Several services operate this “quantification” of the body: among those, the Netexplo award SimSensei proposes a tool for psychological distress diagnosis through a simple video interview operated by a digital avatar.  The tool analyzes objective measurements of the user’s verbal and nonverbal behavior and can allow the clinician or healthcare provider to make a more informed diagnosis. 

With the advent of 3D printing, the Forum explored the transition from biometrics to bionics with technology that prints human skin (SkinPrint), reducing the risk of rejection by the body.

At the same time, Mobile 3D scanner proposed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, is an application that transforms a smartphone into a 3D scanner, reconstructing a 3D representation based on a very large number of photos taken from different viewpoints by the phone’s in-built camera.

The increased capacity of major internet platforms to track users' data is certainly giving rise to questions linked to privacy and the data exploitation by business. Are we heading towards transparency by surveillance, asks Professor Levy in his trend analysis.

Developed by a team of German students, Soma Analytics identifies stress-related behaviour among people at work by measuring the warning signs of a burnout: voice pitch, quality of sleep, and typos on computer keyboards.

On the same line, a number of innovations spotted by the Netexplo international networks seem to prefigure an increased monitoring of behavior at work, in a quest for increased productivity and “useful” interaction among employees.

However, among this year's awards is Jelly, an application created by one of the co-founders of Twitter (a Netexplo award winner in 2008) proposing a way of helping each other in a connected society: the application offers a new way to search, based on images and the sharing of knowledge on social networks. Jelly is a cousin of classic search engines: the user asks a question, and the search engine provides one or more answers. 

The Forum has also addressed several other topics such as the dissemination of knowledge in Africa through digital technologies; or the experience of Start-up Chile as a way to promote the digital economy in Latin America.