“The future is already here –its just not very evenly distributed” – William Gibson.
Back in 2013 James asked me to help out with organising ThingMonk, a new conference focused on the Internet of Things, but built around the people who actually create things, rather than pulling large numbers out of thin air. William Gibsons perceptive quote was then, and is still now, incredibly apt when it comes to describing the Internet of Things.
Fast forward to 2015 and we are running the third ThingMonk in London, and like the Internet of Things, ThingMonk has evolved. We are no longer hacking on devices on day one, this year we are focusing on the real problems developers are facing at scale. As Tim Kellogg, then working at 2lemetry, which has since become part of Amazon, said last year
You'd think an IoT conference would be a circle jerk of iffy ideas, but @thingmonk is proving to be very realistic yet empowering
— tim (@kellogh) December 3, 2014
That brings us to this years event. At ThingMonk this year, we are looking at the hard problems in the Internet of Things, and curating a track within the conference, IoT at Scale, with our friends at SAP. The IoT at Scale track builds upon an event we organised last year in Palo Alto and if you want a flavor of what that event was like check out the videos of all the talks, including a wonderful keynote from James Gosling on the unique problems, such as how do you keep things running when the equivalent of a multi story building is going to fall on top of you every few minutes, his team faces at Liquid Robotics.
Other themes this year bring together the most significant problems we encounter with the Internet of Things at scale
- Data, Analytics and IoT: How to use, present and aggregate data at IOT scale.
- Time Series and IoT
- Design and IoT: Designing for users, their context and scale.
- Industrial IoT and IoT in Manufacturing.
- Full stack IoT: The power of the network, how connected devices, platforms, services and data come together.
- IoT and Sustainability.
ThingMonk is a small intimate event with amazing speakers, content and some of the brightest minds working on IoT in attendance. This year’s venue is the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, which is also the home of Arcola Energy – a company who are building hydrogen fuel cells. Last year the inventor of MQTT, IBM’s Andy Stanford-Clark gave his talk from a raspberry pi, #hypi, powered by hydrogen fuel cells from Arcola Energy.
Now @andysc presenting off of an hydrogen-powered Raspberry Pi at @thingmonk … how cool is that? #IoT pic.twitter.com/Gzx2PcgGzb
— Michael Hausenblas (@mhausenblas) December 3, 2014
Andy is speaking again this year, and we can only guess what he is going to do next. Did we mention the people who are actually building the future are our speakers?
This years line up is pretty epic, with people such as the founder of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, co-author of Designing Connected Products – Claire Rowland, distributed design expert Matt Biddulph, Basho CTO Dave McCory, Cambridge academic Boris Adryan, Product Healths Tamara Giltsoff, CEO of OpenSensors.io Yodit Stanton, Jermeiah Stone from GE and more.
The Arcola Theatre is just five minutes by train from Shoreditch High Street on the London Overground (check out Citymapper if you need help finding your way around) and is an amazing, unique, space, and definitely not your traditional conference venue.
Want to learn about what happens next? Tickets for ThingMonk are on sale now.
Disclaimer: SAP, Amazon, GE and Basho are RedMonk clients.
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