As expected, this years’ 2013 Georgia Technology Summit on March 20, 2013 was a great event -- with a host of dynamic speakers and presentations. For those not familiar with the event, the annual summit brings together executives, entrepreneurs, tech professionals and academia from Georgia’s technology community.

We were able to catch presentations by two of the scheduled speakers this year: Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet and current Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin; and Matt Quinlan, CTO of Visa.

Metcalfe‘s presentation was engaging as he focused his dry wit on venture capital and entrepreneurism and the presence of entrepreneur “clusters” around the country in places like Silicon Valley, Austin and Boston.  He specifically cited Atlanta as noteworthy in today’s economy as a “FinTech cluster.”

Quinlan’s presentation was a fascinating case study on Visa and its global operations. Some interesting metrics included:.

• Visa has 8,000 employees globally, processes 24,000 transactions a second and a total volume of $6 trillion worth of transactions per year.
• Visa introduced the world’s first ATM network in 1983.
• An interesting shift in thought taking place at Visa:  With the proliferation of NFC and Mobile Wallet technology, many traditional in-person point-of-sale transactions could now technically be considered “Card Not Present” transactions, so Visa is expanding its thinking to include “Customer Not Present” for online transactions in addition to “Card Not Present.”

Here are some additional statistics, factoids and other metrics we found interesting:

• By 2014, there will be more active smartphones on Earth than humans.
• 70% of all payments are processed in Georgia.
• Online/Internet transactions represent the fastest growing payments segment.
• It’s an inevitability -- EMV/chip is coming to America…soon.
• Georgia’s technology jobs led the state’s employment recovery and represent more than 20% of all new jobs created in the state over the last 2 years.
• Georgia is one of the top 10 U.S. states for mobile development, with at least 24,000 jobs attributed to this area.

TAG’s annual State of the Industry report is available at www.tagstateoftheindustry.com.