James Governor's Monkchips

Thingmonk Done, Monki Gras Next

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Turns out that running four conferences in as many months is hard. Really hard. What with IOT@Scale with SAP, Thingmonk, The Business of IoT, and next Monki Gras I have had my hands full. Without Fintan Ryan helping me pull things together I could not have managed.  Throw in Christmas, and as ever I am delinquent in posting.

The second Thingmonk was a blast. People really enjoyed the program. I wanted to run a conference “for IOT people looking at development, design and data to get stuck in with the programmers, designers and visionaries that are making the Internet of Things.” and I feel I did pretty well there.

We had amazing talks from a wide range of speakers, some alumni, some new additions to the RedMonk community.

Alasdair Allan (how we’re doing IoT wrong, and need to put people first)

Patrick Bergel, Founder and CEO, Animal Systems, (how limited we are in imagining how things will talk)

Chris Swan, CTO Cohesive (security of lack of it in IoT)

Tamara Giltsoff, VP bus dev, Product Health (data and sustainable cradle to cradle supply chains for energy in emerging markets)

Leanne Templeman and Reid Carlberg, Salesforce (how IoT is driving development platform requirements)

Dr Boris Adryan, Department of Genetics, Cambridge University (What the IoT Should Learn from Life Sciences)

Shalini Kapoor, IBM Distinguished Engineer (the Internet of Connected Cars)

Tim Kellogg, 2lemetry (What’s next for MQTT)

Naveed Parvez, founder and CEO Andiamo (the Internet of Empathy)

Damon Hart Davis, OpenTRV (the Internet of Smart, cheap, plugs)

Yodit Stanton, Opensensors.io (an update from a local startup, Thingmonk Alumni and friend of RedMonk)

Ian Skerrett, Eclipse Foundation marketing director (the confusing soup of IoT “standards” and how we should move forward)

Alexandros Marianos, founder resin.io (building a SONOS clone in under 5 minutes, live demo. amazing)

Tony Smith, writer Electric Imp (pitch by former Register editor, poached turned gamekeeper)

Michael Hausenblas, MapR data engineer (a toolbox for IoT data management)

Nick O’Leary, IBM (incredible talk on machine to human and M2M conversations)

Andy Stanford Clark, IBM (demo of a hydrogen powered Raspberry Pi!)

Adrian Grabinar (PhD, Creative Exchange Hub (making music playlists into something you can touch again)

A wide range of topics then, and they meshed together well.

Thanks Tim!

It’s impossible to put on a conference with great food, drinks and logistics unless you have great sponsors. In this regard we were very very lucky at ThingMonk. So massive thanks to Salesforce, 2lemetry, Eclipse Foundation, Aviva Insurance, IBM, ThingWorx, and SAP. For the hackday, APIs were wrangled and we got SAP, IBM and Salesforce talking to each other, and to Adam Gunther’s Hoff styled leather jacket. Oh yeah – IBM even brought a connected car to hack.  Espruino, Tessel, and resin.io all played a starring role.

Truth is it is very early days in the Internet of Things. This isn’t the end, or the beginning of the end, but it may be just be the end of the beginning. Standards, the role of data, open source, open hardware, programming models, business models are all in flux. Who knows – Uber may yet become the biggest IoT player on the planet, once it delivers flying cars, though I personally am going long on IFTTT. Suffice to say, there is plenty more to share and learn and work together on. That’s why we’re now planning Thingmonk in North America.

But first, at the end of this month, comes Monki Gras, for the fourth time. We’re taking a different cut this time around. I have done Social Craft, Scaling Craft and Sharing Craft, but was running out of runway with “S”s. instead this year I am looking at Nordic culture, and how it has been massively influential in powering the Internet – from IRC to SSH to Linux to MySQL to PHP to Varnish to C# to GIT. If you want to know How To Do Things Right in Software Development then check out the Nordics- Silicon Valley is just one center of gravity for the Web buildout. Then consider the businesses such as – Skype, Spotify, Rovio, and SuperCell, all epic market leaders.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Read my next post to find out more about why you should get involved with Monki Gras 2015 – either as an attendee, sponsor or both.

 

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