Big brains populate the show floor - the first pictures

This huge Future Internet Conference Week lures hundreds and even thousands of visitors to the beautiful city of Ghent. What they get is impressive: a program of high level presentations, visions by gurus from different areas of research and a wealth of demonstrations on the show floor.

Main sponsors Alcatel-Lucent (platinum sponsor), Belgacom and Telenet (gold sponsors) and Cisco and VRT Medialab (silver sponsors) set the tone for most of the participants to the exhibition: they come mainly from the ICT-sector. Not surprisingly, as the researchers that come to the Future Internet Conference Week are also mainly concerned with making advances in information technology.

Researchers in other domains also knows what ICT can mean to their work. That’s why the French hardware vendor Bull is highlighting its supercomputing platform bullx at the exhibition. Bullx is a platform used throughout the world by researchers using simulation to make advances in health, energy and safety.

GPS-leader TomTom brings a message to government: its customers can save up to 15 percent of time by making better use of the roads and the information TomTom is gathering from its own users and other sources, can help every participant in traffic with a five percent reduction in traffic time.

"Improving mobility by five percent is something that would otherwise only be feasible with heavy investments in infrastructure" (Bart De Wolf)

Leiedal and the city of Kortrijk are demonstrating the projects they worked out with their European partners in the Smartcities network. These projects aim to improve the services delivery to their citizens.

“Customer friendliness used to be the most important value to local government, now customer centricity is the name of the game, which allows for a lot of participation and interactivity.”

During Future Internet Conference Week, Leiedal and Kortrijk want to get more visibility for their projects, while in the mean time sharing experiences about possible methodologies to improve customer centricity.

Pearlchain.net is looking for commercial contacts at the exhibition. This Belgian company uses the umbrella stand of the Limburgse Reconversie Maatschappij to present their software that allows merchandisers to promote and track sales of their products at retailers.

Insight Publishers wants to close the gap between academics and the business world.

“There’s a lot of research that is of great value to business worldwide. That’s why we launched our magazine Projects as a platform to make this research public” (Sam Davis)

At Future Internet Conference Week, Insight is launching the interactive version of its publication. It contains links to the internet, includes movies  and it is a lot easier to update than a printed publication.

Executive search agency Schelstraete & Desmedt are looking for the big brains that populate this conference.

“We are here to network, but also to meet interesting candidates for our customers. We just met someone who has a solid academic background but would rather pursue his career in a corporate environment. This is ideal for some of our clients.”

(José Delameilleure)