Companies ranging from doll manufacturers to search engines made up a UK contingent of technology companies at the 2012 Dublin Web Summit.

Founded by Irish entrepreneur Paddy Cosgrave in 2010, this year’s event sprad over 17 and 18 October has attracted 4,000 people, 300 start-ups and exhibitors and 200 speakers.

The first day of the conference saw keynote talks from Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, AOL ‘digital prophet’ David Shing and Kevin Rose, partner at Google Ventures.

Discussions on the main stage centred on mobile payments, making social networks worthwhile and crowdfunding.

The summit also had three separate speaker stages hosting businesses from the digital, cloud and developer industries.

Global investors including Wellington Partners, Polaris Ventures, Greylock Partners, DFJ Esprit and Balderton Capital are in attendance for the two day event.

Speaking to GrowthBusiness, Cosgrave says that he believes venture capital firms are finally switching onto what is happening in Dublin and wider Europe.

‘NEA is the biggest venture capital fund in the world and two of their partners are here, Tony Florence [general partner] is speaking this afternoon.

‘Anthony Noto, head of TMT at Goldman Sachs, has flown from New York to speak at the event. On top of that there are Accel, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Index – so we have partners from every one of the major VC firms globally.

‘I think that is only indicative of something positive happening in Europe. You just have to be cautious and you hope it’s not over hyped as there are legitimate companies with great future prospects coming out of the region.’