CW Edge Week events recreate networking environment online
CW’s Edge Week took place last week, with two virtual showcases catering to an online audience of more than 600 people over three days.
The annual CW International Conference (CWIC) took place on Tuesday, with this year’s technology showcase virtual for the first time. More than 400 attendees were welcomed by platinum sponsor Huawei before leading into sessions on topics including transport solutions, smart cities, fintech and health.
The winners of the CW Technology and Innovation awards were also announced on the Tuesday. They included Connected Kerb, Redtail Telematics and Taubyte. Yue Wang, senior technology manager at Samsung Electronics’ Network AI, won the Outstanding Woman Engineer of the Year award sponsored by ARU.
PaaS Consortium announcement: A new Paas - ‘Product as a Service’ consortium led by CW and founding members Arm, ghd and BAT, to successfully support and scale the transformation of product companies to digital services.
Abhi Naha, CEO and Founder of the PaaS Consortium and CCO of CW, said: “With the advancement of digital connectivity, cloud based subscription services and the ability to collaborate with major telecommunications companies new opportunities are arising to enter a digital services market place to meet this need. Not only will we be collaborating and sharing eco system technology partners but also adopting best business practices, disruptive channels to market and provide valuable and secure digital consumer experiences beyond proof-of-concept trials.”
The group is chaired by Chris Porthouse, chief product officer of Imagination Technologies. With exclusive access to a NB-IoT design reference platform developed for this group, members will be able to accelerate product trials during early phase development, which will gather important usage metrics without the need to modify the products.
CWIC explored six thematical track sessions: Transport Solutions & Logistics; Health & Social Care; Digital Infrastructure & Smart Cities; Creative Industries; FinTech with speakers from Google, Salesforce, Samsung and Imagination Technologies.
Ben Brabyn, a fintech ecosystem specialist, hosted an afternoon session on simtech, with speakers from Google, Salesforce and Uhuru.
“I introduced the speakers, each gave a presentation followed by a Q&A,” Ben said. “The presentations were pre-recorded but it worked very well.
“Most topics explored developments in edge computing, with speakers highlighting various changes in business with covid.”
The Google talk was delivered by cloud solutions consultant Matthew Yeager, and Ben noted Matthew’s idea of “creating a weather machine for simtech, ie federated computing, which makes sure tasks are distributed between edge devices and servers to have the best of both”.
The CW Virtual Networking Lounge and Exhibition was powered by California-based Remo, whose interactive networking platform and exhibition tables allow delegates to engage in conversations in real-time.
“Chatting in the virtual breakout area was excellent,” Ben said. “It’s a difficult challenge to recreate a physical event virtually, and I take my hat off to the CW team, they created an excellent event. The chat area was full of very interesting people to talk to.”
On Wednesday and Thursday, CW hosted the CW Technology & Engineering Conference (CWTEC), ‘Demystifying the Edge’ conference.
Designed specifically for engineers, the two-day event saw more than 200 attendees engage with three thematical sessions – latency, cloud and webscalers – with speakers from Huawei, Amazon, Nokia, BT and Microsoft. The networking lounge was again powered by Remo.
“We trialled it for the first time – it’s very interactive,” a CW spokesperson said of the new networking option.