Tech Talks Central

Valerie Riffaud Cangelosi, New Market Development Manager for Epson Europe starts by explaining why Epson is not only about printers and projectors. Her own main focus is the sensing technologies and wearables Epson is developing, like the Android based smart glasses or wrist watch that monitors heart pulse. She mentions health projects they’re collaborating on with hospitals from Lombardia and how they’re trying to provide solutions. Valerie talks, also, about how education and the students themselves are integrating technology. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Peter Margaris, Head of Service Provider Product Marketing at F5 Networks talks about his company & the infrastructure solutions they provide to service providers to optimize their application performance, traffic and signal management including security solutions and NFE infrastructure. Collaborating already with 9 out of 10 of the largest global operators and many smaller ones they already foresee the impact the data created by IoT will put on service provider networks, surpassing that of wireless or smartphones. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Kari Kohtamaki, Account Manager for Wellness & Healthcare Technologies at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, explains how VTT is a multi disciplined applied research institute owned by the Finnish Government, employing over 2600 research scientists. He talks about the ECHAlliance and how it’s popularity within Europe can help research institutes collaborate with stakeholders. Kari goes on to describe the development in the eHealth sector within the Scandinavian countries, the opportunities and the challenges that need to be addressed; how easy it is to collaborate with countries in the South of Europe and how the new market of China offers a new test bed for research. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

James Tagg, author of the book ‘Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?’ presented in front of an audience his own beliefs on the Singularity issue. He started out by answering his own question ‘Can a Machine think Creatively?’ and argued mathematically on how much artificial intelligence has progressed, which are the crucial parity point dates and why he doesn’t believe that machines can surpass the creativity of humans. The speech was conducted during a Heroes of Mobile event organised by its founder Helen Keegan, on the 2nd of March at the Talent Garden(TAG).

Helen and friends of Heroes of the Mobile Fringe organised the Choons ‘n chat conversation in parallel with the Fringe activities and Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona; Helen Keegan, Mobile Strategist & founder at Heroes of the Mobile Fringe; Rosa Aguilar, Fitbit; Carlo Longino, WIP.org; Rafe Blandford, Mobile Strategist at DigitasLBi, Kirsta Styles, Tech Journalist at TechCityNews and a few more friends got together in Barcelona during the MWC15 and talked about the future of mobile, needs, potential fields of development, applications and how it all needs to reach the ordinary people. The podcast was moderated by Vicki Kolovou and Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central. Yannis Rizopoulos, host for Tech Talks Central made sure everything was recorded on video.

Ian Parness and Brad Folkens explain how the difficulty of searching on the mobile led to the creation of Camfind; a mobile application that returns results for anything you snap an image of, ranging from a lady’s handbag to a living animal. Ian mentions the interest they have received from companies to integrate their product into their own platforms, mainly retail for product matching, price comparison, but also stock photography vendors or even applications for the visually impaired. Brad explains how valuable their app is with over 11 patents filed; how it always returns results (successful image recognition 100% to a varying degree of detail); what their revenue model is and how their $5M funding will help the product develop. The third founder, Dominik Mazur, was mentioned but not present at the interview. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Mark Dunson, President of Emerson Climate and Mobeen Khan, AVP of Industrial IoT Solutions at AT&T come together in this interview to explain how Emerson Climate is currently leveraging AT&T’s IoT services for their vision of the connected kitchen. Mark talks about their big expertise in the air condition & refrigeration sectors and how they are using AT&T’s knowledge and infrastructure to serve their large clientele in the connected kitchen focusing on maintenance costs, food integrity and labor costs. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Philip Verschueren, founder at iCapps talks about their new application, MoveBattle, fueled by wearables and the Apple Health Kit. Their moto is Move as a team and beat the others! An application with a gamification process that he hopes will make fitness and basic training fun and a collective process, that will motivate everyone on the team to participate and in general meet their fitness goals. He hopes to engage employees in companies to exercise more and eventually implement a hosting platform for everyone’s data to be served there. He explains why the company is looking for funding and what they hoped to achieve through their presence at 4YFN. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Zac Jacobs co-director of the multi-award winning company Millipede and creator of Dumb Ways to Die 2, the no.1 game in 81 countries, with over 45M downloads, talks about his company, the team and what it takes to be so successful. He talks about the thought process that goes in game development; what game developers should search for and why it is almost impossible to find women game programmers although female players are the significant proportion (65%) of game users. He goes on to talk about investing in startups, trends he sees in the future and what it means to grow as a startup in Australia. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Ben Bickford talks about his work as a consultant combining technology flavours and organisational goals. His interest in big data or ‘big insights’ as he says, customer behaviour and how the companies can use the information to grow. He describes how he follows the entrepreneurial spirit and how he believes that the future is the combination of existing technologies bringing them together in a novel way and how mobile is part of the whole value chain. Ben suggests developers look into opportunities within the corporate sector and how they can solve problems by creating B2B solutions. He goes on to talk more about his extraordinary life, how he started trading from highschool, what he learned and how he never took the easy path to expansion. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

David O’Neill describes how Seattle based APImetrics offers the industry’s first and only intelligent, analytics-driven API performance solution built specifically for the enterprise. He explains what the current problems are with APIs are and how companies need to monitor their APIs with analytics, receive alerts and take action in order to meet service level agreements(SLAs) and customer expectations. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Guy Martin, Senior Strategist at Samsung Open Source Group and Head of Digital Marketing at Open Interconnect Consortium explains how OIC intends to connect the next 50 billion devices that will make up the Internet of Things. What the need was and how some of the members like Samsung, Intel, Cisco, HP, GE Software have realised that there is not much differentiation in intellectual property but mostly infrastructure. Which means building the Standards and specifications through OIC and the open source code and reference implementation of the standard within the Iotivity project, which is hosted at the Linux Foundation; OIC funds the project. Guy predicts which verticals will be the next big thing in IoT, including smarthome and industry and he answers on a personal level what his opinion is on data protection. Kimberley Lewis, Marketing Program Manager for Standards and Advanced Technologies at Intel was present during the interview and fully aligned with Guy’s responses, judging from her nodding of the head

Brian O’Connor picks up the thread from the eHealth Forum in Athens and the legacy that was created there leading to an expansion of new country members and stakeholders. They have created over 25 ecosystems that include governments and industry members with over 15000 organisations involved, and more than 100 meetings, yearly. He explains how ECHAlliance came about to helping in the creation of the China Connected Health Alliance upon the request of the Chinese Health Minister and what the Great Leap Forward is all about. He analyses what it takes to do business in health within China and where ECHAlliance is aiming for in the future. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Peter Chau, Chief Executive for the newly formed China Connected Health Alliance talks about the need behind the formation of the new alliance and how their European counterpart will be able to pass on their experience and provide access to its existing members. He goes on to describe the Chinese health status and how the government is taking actions and policies for change; the opportunities available for foreign companies within this broad market and amongst the 600 million Chinese users of smartphones. He finishes off with some good advice on how to go about doing business in China. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Norbert Sagnard a man of many hats talks about the Northern Ireland pavillion at MWC, what kind of startups they were hosting ie. security; what it takes to succeed in Northern Ireland and how the state is helping startups get off their feet with grants, schemes and accelerators. He goes on to talk about his own investment interests and the opportunities he sees in the mobile and technology fields. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

Oren Seliger is a lucky guy, as he and his team are the first to lay hands on and evaluate, every new piece of infrastructure used today by the company - the same infrastructure that Cisco proposes to its customers, as well as its Intelligent Autonomous Cloud, the new generation network with lots of extra benefits offered today. He gives us an insider look to all and even more... Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central

Large scale and long running projects need a dedicated and well experienced partner in order to succeed. That’s the inner meaning of what Charalabos Kiorpelidis, Systems & IT Manager of Aegean Motorways, says as he describes the infrastructure built and managed by his team with Cisco’s help, for this key motorway to run smoothly… Unified access, voice/ telephony/video systems, automation and many toll stations, as well as supporting operations like ERP, CRM, etc. the combination is not easy to manage. Moreover, IoE is now entering the (motor)way, too. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central

Projections of more than 50 billion connected devices and a market of at least 19 trillion dollars by 2020 are not regarded as hype, by Antonis Tsiboukis, General Manager of Cisco for Greece, Cyprus and Malta. On the contrary, he points out that Internet of Everything has already considerable presence even in Greece, citing examples from the health and transportation sectors. He says that #IoE may also create a large number of new jobs (many more than those lost) and adds that cities have to be “smart” in order to survive and Cisco along with its partners can help them in order to reach that goal. Interviewed by Yannis Rizopoulos for Tech Talks Central

Corporate networks become more intelligent but also more complicated driving increasingly demanding business needs. We talk with Nikos Botinis, Cisco Regional Sales Manager for Greece, Cyprus and Malta, about Cisco FastIT; the new App-centric IT operating model which considerably reduces complexity and cost through a simpler, smarter and more secure IT infrastructure. Having Internet of Everything at its core, Fast IT provides a unifying framework to integrate major technology transitions - cloud, mobility, SDN, security and data analytics. Interviewed by George Voulgaris for Tech Talks Central

Cloud processing, storage and distribution is driving many core operations, services and applications in the IT infrastructures of modern organizations. As a result, public and private cloud deployments are an essential and critical piece of the IT puzzle. We talk with Enrico Mercadante, Cloud and Technical Operation Leader, Cisco South Europe, about Intercloud Fabric: the worldwide network of interconnected clouds. Driven by Cisco and a growing number of partners, Intercloud enables the standardization of hybrid clouds which seamlessly combine public and private cloud deployments. Interviewed by George Voulgaris for Tech Talks Central.