The Irish startup scene is "a tribe", says Storyful founder Mark Little, who founded the social news agency in 2010 and sold it for €18m three years later.
He was speaking on a panel of successful entrepreneurs at the Bank of Ireland Startlab in Galway, one of RTE MoJoCon's Fringe events held to discuss mobile media entrepreneurship.
Little highlighted the sheer scale of technological innovation in media, he said: "This has happened in the blink of a historical eye," and discussed his days of foreign correspondence reporting and how he had to take so much equipment to transfer and broadcast his stories.
With the power of a mobile phone and the skills of MoJo, Little said, "Anyone has the ability to tell a story with a smartphone."
Afterwards, Mark spoke about the importance of events like MoJoCon. "Something like this gathering is the equivalent of putting people in a room and creating the infections that will create the innovation, but you won’t know it in that room at that moment. It may take years for something to come to fruition.
"If you think about the revolution that has taken place, it used to be that if you wanted to reach a mass audience, you would have to have a satellite dish, a radio transmitter or a printing press. In the space of literally a couple of years, anybody with access to a smartphone and a social network could reach a mass audience. That has changed everything."
Aisling Moloney @AislingTM
