Startups: The Heart of A City
« Entrepreneurs don’t start out to create vibrant cities. They just want to build successful businesses. But as an inevitable side effect of creating great companies, they become an essential catalyst of healthy growing cities.
Peter has been active in Silicon Valley for more than 40 years. He has seen entrepreneurial energy transform the Santa Clara Valley from the Prune Capital of America to an engine of growth and change for the entire world.
In this session, he’ll share insights on the technology that works—and actually matters—versus the technology that’s just eye candy. »
Why Dungeons & Dragons (not Science Fiction) Predicts Our Future
As the Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Everything, we’re entering a world where every object becomes an enchanted object. With the advent of essentially free computation, memory, and wireless technology, Internet connectivity will be woven into everything valuable enough to be bought, sold, or stolen. People who write code are the sorcerers of tomorrow.
Humanity’s future as a spacefaring species isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Fundamental physical constraints are held back by advances in energy technology that increase at only 3-5% per year, versus the 18-month doubling in electronics due to Moore’s Law. Together with advances in biotechnology, and virtual reality headsets that (literally) make your head spin, our future technology of the next 100 years is going to follow a virtual and literal path of Dungeons and Dragons, not spaceflight.
A world of enchanted objects is already arriving – thermostats that program themselves, phones that retrieve and display information based on voice commands, cars and planes that drive themselves – all of these things impact every part of our lives. As an experienced early stage investor in successful Internet of Things companies like Nest and Mocana, Rob plans to share his views about what’s highly predictable about this trend, and how entrepreneurs can capitalize on it.
Bits to atoms
After fifteen years of scaling startups and web infrastructure at companies like Amazon, and creating tools to manage large-scale systems automation at Chef, Jesse Robbins founded a hardware company called OnBeep. A year in, the team has learned a lot about what it takes to build physical, real-world components. In this session, Jesse and OnBeep Product Engineer Sylvia Wu share what they’ve learned, and offer recommendations for anyone who wants to make the leap from bits to atoms.
Tech isn’t magic
While it seems like you can launch a startup out of thin air, there’s actually a. Lot of hard-core engineering under the covers. Ignore it at your peril. Prepare for it when your competitors haven’t, and you’ll win.
Join Harper Reed for an unfiltered look at the infrastructure it takes to win a market, an attack, or an election. Using examples from Threadless, Obama for America, and elsewhere, he’ll peel back the layers of the disaster onion, showing you why you can’t sit on the shoulders of giants without also looking them squarely in the eyes.
Re-Inventing Cities
Cities are one of humankind’s greatest inventions. More than four thousands years ago, we began the process of separating ourselves from the forces of natural Darwinism. By concentrating large numbers of people with wide ranges of interests, beliefs, and skills into high density living, we created the framework for driving forward our civilization. In the 21st century we will come close to completing our evolution into a species of city dwellers. Since 2008 more than 50% of us live in urban areas and by 2050 predictions suggest reaching 80%. To achieve this the world will build in the 21st century as much new urban infrastructure as existed at the end of the 20th century. We are entering the Age of Cities.
However, architects, urban planners, public administrators, agency leaders and many other stakeholders in urban living struggle to understand the impact that Information Technology will have on cities. Their thinking is naturally rooted in the permanence and immutability of concrete and steel and in 19th century organizational methods. But we live now in the Age of Intelligent Systems, which we expect to have characteristics such as awareness, responsiveness, adaptation, personalization, and so forth. In the smart cities movement the Internet of Things is instrumenting a myriad flows of information in cities. How can we leverage the new visibility of these flows to help cities evolve into intelligent systems? How can we re-invent how we live together in cities?
In this talk Distinguished Engineer Emeritus and inventor of IBM’s Smarter Cities architecture, Dr Colin Harrison, will share observations of these trends and offer suggestions for a wide range of start up opportunities based on viewing cities as intelligent systems that touch all of our lives.
Future of Food: Fresh, Local & Responsible
When Mohamed Hage pitched his idea to developers seven years ago, they said it couldn’t be done. But technical advances, automation, and the marriage of urban integration and business savvy have proven them wrong.
Today, with two commercial rooftop greenhouses completed and another in the works for the greater Montreal area, Lufa founder Mohamed Hage is pioneering a new kind of high-tech urban agriculture that brings green approaches, automation, sensors, and hyper-local logistics to the downtown core.
Join Mo for a first-hand look at the latest in greenhouse tech: Lufa Farms’ 43,000-square-foot farm in Laval, where 22 varieties of heirloom and gourmet tomatoes thrive. Using a live video hookup to Greenhouse Director and Founding Member, Lauren Rathmell, we’ll look at how plants grow and how they thrive in a high-tech environment free of pesticides and other harmful chemicals.
The Accelerator Smack-down
Accelerators, incubators, launchpads—all of them promise funding, contacts, and priceless wisdom from proven mentors. But who’s got what it takes? What are the soaring Unicorns and the total flameouts? In this no-holds-barred VC panel, we’ll look at the good, the bad, and the ugly, from the best ideas that failed to the worst ideas that took off. Come decide for yourself which accelerators are breaking clear of the pack.
Why digital handshakes will never replace the real thing
The human species connects virtually trillions of times a day. We’re rushing to colonize a second, online world, one we share with colleagues, family, friends, and complete strangers.
Yet this inexorable move to digital connectivity hasn’t removed our very real need to connect face-to-face. We travel around the globe to share a meal; we fly across a continent to cement a business relationship with a handshake. We take in conference speakers at events rather than on the screens of our computers.
Industries have recognized this. Proponents of teleworking are calling their employees back to the office, realizing that there’s simply no substitute for physical presence.
What does this mean for startups? In this break-out session building on her keynote talk, join Margaret Dawson and look at why the killer app for our digital era may just be human contact.
The Future of Mobile Productivity
Smartphone adoption continues unabated and tablets are rapidly cannibalizing PC sales, but productivity workers still hold onto their computers. In this session, Sean will look at the trends behind the newest generation of mobile productivity apps, how app developers and OEMs are working to make road warriors productive on their tablets and phones, and how the mobile operating systems are trying to support or, in some cases, fight against it. You’ll learn about the tactics that are working for Dropbox and other apps, and the opportunities for motivated companies to become essential in powering mobile productivity workers in this rapidly changing ecosystem.
The New Inequality: Data Haves and Have-Nots
Nathaniel Raymond will discuss how the rising inequality in who can access what data and when can make certain populations more vulnerable to natural disaster, disease, and conflict. Drawing on his experiences responding to catastrophes ranging from Hurricane Katrina to war in Afghanistan and Sudan, Raymond proposes steps individuals, corporations and nations can take to improve data equity for everybody.
With easier access to every aspect of the supply chain and increased ease of rapid prototyping, short launch cycles are no longer exclusive to software, or the clothing industry.. The winners in the next generation of connected devices will be the ones that can quickly adapt to rapidly changing consumer preferences, staying one step ahead of the increasingly nimble competition. The barriers for hardware are falling, vision, brand and distribution are what separate those that make it past their first production run from those that don’t. In this talk, Katherine will share some of the trends driving rapid shifts in the hardware ecosystem today, with examples from some of today’s hottest hardware startups and emerging service providers.
Why Dungeons & Dragons (not Science Fiction) Predicts Our Future
As the Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Everything, we’re entering a world where every object becomes an enchanted object. With the advent of essentially free computation, memory, and wireless technology, Internet connectivity will be woven into everything valuable enough to be bought, sold, or stolen. People who write code are the sorcerers of tomorrow.
Humanity’s future as a spacefaring species isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Fundamental physical constraints are held back by advances in energy technology that increase at only 3-5% per year, versus the 18-month doubling in electronics due to Moore’s Law. Together with advances in biotechnology, and virtual reality headsets that (literally) make your head spin, our future technology of the next 100 years is going to follow a virtual and literal path of Dungeons and Dragons, not spaceflight.
A world of enchanted objects is already arriving – thermostats that program themselves, phones that retrieve and display information based on voice commands, cars and planes that drive themselves – all of these things impact every part of our lives. As an experienced early stage investor in successful Internet of Things companies like Nest and Mocana, Rob plans to share his views about what’s highly predictable about this trend, and how entrepreneurs can capitalize on it.
