Tag Archives: pictures from exhibition

Dear regulars and visitors to my blog, I continue to pay back my week-old debts. The week in question was pretty hectic. To be more precise, it was an eight-dayer, because it stretched from Monday to Monday.

It all started with my departure from Moscow to St. Petersburg on Sunday evening, and was rounded off by my return from Ekaterinburg to Moscow early on Tuesday morning (right after midnight). All in all, there were four cities on my itinerary, seven flights and 35 hours in the air: Moscow (SVO) – St. Petersburg – Moscow (DME, connection) – Singapore – Sanya – Almaty (refuel) – Ekaterinburg – Moscow (SVO).

The best route from St. Pete to Singapore was via Domodedovo airport in Moscow, where I could catch the direct MOW-SIN (Moscow – Singapore) flight. From St. Pete to Domodedovo, I flew S7 economy class (S7 doesn’t offer business class on this route) without anything of note to report. However, if I have the same sort of connection at Domodedovo again, I will definitely give a full account. Everything there is so messed up inconvenient. They really must have put their minds to it to make it so awkward. I always try to make connections at the far more convenient Sheremetyevo, but this time I had little choice.

Singapore Airlines was top notch, as always. After 10 hours of relaxation, we landed at 6 a.m. in the dream city of Singapore!

http://instagram.com/p/BWSvIgglZas/

Read on: The Interpol exhibition is interesting…

Hi folks!

Time to tell you all about this year’s Starmus. Last year the conference took place in sunny Tenerife. This year – just the opposite: it was in rainy Trondheim in Norway. Not that the rain made the experience any worse. Mere weather cannot dull something so otherworldly as Starmus…

Here’s the audience slowly filling up the venue just before kick-off:

This year 2,500 folks attended (at least, that’s how many tickets were sold), plus there’d have been untold numbers watching the proceedings via the Internet. And judging by the fact that the large hall was packed, I reckon all those who purchased tickets were in fact there.

Read on: Norwegian armed chess forces…

The brainteaser from yesterday’s post: ‘what’s not right in this [that] blogpost?’

Answer: the last three pix were of Melbourne! :)

Yep, for that was the next city on my itinerary. Now, I always like visiting Melbourne, but having to leave Sydney on the eve of its yearly Vivid festival to get to Melbourne, well, that’s just not cricket. Here are the pics from 2015 and 2013. Vivid Sydney is a festival that you really have to experience once in a lifetime if possible. There’s no other festival comes near. But I digress. Here we are… in Melbourne!

Another lovely city, but we saw hardly any of it this time: airport (‘welcome!’) > taxi > conference > speech (‘thank you, good bye, come again!’) > taxi > airport. And that was it! The only (non-work-related) thing worth taking photos of were… these here works of art on the walls of the hotel where the conference was taking place. Perplexing is the word I’d used to describe them. Mysterious too, perhaps.  What do you think? Oh, and… what, exactly, are the pictures of? :)

Oh well; I’ll just have to show you some work-themed pics – from CeBit Australia conference:

Read on: Work, Deja-vu and ransomware…

I have a very high opinion of Schindler, the world’s leading manufacturer of elevators and escalators. (Next time you use these modes of transport, take note of the manufacturer’s logo.) In my view, this company deserves lots of respect and its business practices are worthy of study and emulation. However, when I see the company’s booth at an exhibition, replete with slogans like this, it sends a shiver down my spine, I start feeling uncomfortable about the world around me, and my left eye starts to twitch. Why?

There were three slogans that I had a particular problem with:

– How can I turn my elevator into a digital native?
– What is your elevator doing while you sleep?
– Can you meet your elevator online?

If you take a closer look, you can see them in this photo:

It may not bother everyone, but it makes me a little apprehensive. Of course, you understand… An elevator in the Internet is not as dangerous as the Internet in an elevator! OK, that’s tonight’s nightmares taken care of. No, I’m not trying to scare you. And I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to dream about the elevator from this cartoon!

The venue is Hannover Messe, the yearly mega-exhibition of industrial solutions. It’s all about automation, manufacturing, the energy industry, all sorts of robots, the rarest spare parts and other types of modern industrial magic.

Read on: Pretty interesting!…

Location: Earth, Europe, Spain, Catalonia, Barcelona, Mobile World Congress 2017.

Another year, another season, and I’m back into my must-attend event-extraordinaire-schedule. And the Barcelonan MWC is one such must-attend event-extraordinaire. I’ve already written plenty about the basics regarding this annual technology show, and I don’t want to repeat all that this year. But last year I was here for such a short length of time that I had no time to look around properly. This year there were carefully planned pauses between my scheduled appointments, so I was able to get my camera out and go walkabout around this extraordinary exhibition.

But this post isn’t a professional analysis of the Barcelona conference; for that – check out specialized media. Here: merely a synopsis – and pics – of what the CEO of a cybersecurity company found most curiously interesting, if not breathtaking…

1. This event is just so grandiose! Check out my pics from last year, which demonstrate this well. Eight (8!) such exhibition caverns like this:

Read on: Big guns really impress with their big stands…

Wuhan is a city in central China. And ‘Wuhaa!’, I thought when reading about the place on Wikipedia…

Turns out it’s a ‘sub-provincial city’ despite being (i) thoroughly massive, and (ii) the capital and main administrative center of the Hubei province.

The city covers an area of 8500 square kilometers (five times bigger than London!), and has a population of 10 million (almost equal to London). Even for China, the rate and volume of construction in Wuhan are kinda crazy. Mammoth new districts appearing like mushrooms after the rain… actually more like trees of a forest growing up as everything is (really) high-rise. For now the brand new residential skyscrapers are empty, but when they do get filled up, I reckon the population will easily overtake London + suburbs. That’s ‘sub-provincial’ China for you, folks!

Read on: Security for the people…

Right after the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona there was mad dash to get to Nuremberg for another exhibition – Embedded World.

This one is about automating all things that rotate, revolve, pull stuff up and down, heat and refrigerate, pump, chemically bond, move on wheels, float and fly, as well as ‘everything digital for men in orange helmets, and loads of other stuff like that. Big time cyber-industrialism!

Read on: meetings, discussions, presentations…

Barcelona. It’s been a while since my last visit here, and even longer since I was at the Mobile World Congress – that was back in 2012, or four years ago. Those who view that as a sin, forgive me. And yes, I do consider it a sin. Having said that, it’s rather amusing to read through some of my old travel tales!

But enough nostalgia – let me get back to the present day and continue my story —>

The exhibition has changed a lot over the last four years. It used to be a very important event, albeit mobile/smartphone-centric with a local feel to it. Now it has grown into a global mega-exhibition comparable in scale to CES Las Vegas or the massive CeBIT exhibition in Hannover … or how it used to be. Unfortunately, CeBIT has – for some reason, its international participants have gone elsewhere. The good old mega-CeBIT has stopped speaking in all the languages of the world, and is now a distinctly German-language IT exhibition, which is a pity.

OK, enough pessimism. It’s time for me to turn on my caps lock voice.

The Barcelona show is now something else! There are eight huge pavilions, nearly all jam-packed with booths and crowds of visitors milling around the exhibitions. It feels really hot, in the good sense of the word.

We are also on show here:

Read on: I feel nostalgic…

I first used the term ‘Internet-INTERPOL’ somewhere around the start of the 2000s. The first time I got round to writing it down was in 2003. This year – 2015 – some 12 years later, finally, what I’ve been talking about, pushing for, advocating, promoting all these years is here:

An INTERPOL division dedicated exclusively to combatting the dark side of the Internet!

Yep, just the other week in sunny Singapore INTERPOL officially opened its new cyber-division – IGCI – whose mission is to clear cyberspace of all things criminal and similarly bogus. It will act as the coordinating center for all international cyber-related activities of police forces of all its member states (nearly 200 countries!). In short: international hackerism and other net-diseases – watch out, CYBERPOL is here for good to make your lives miserable and increasingly risky. Besides investigations it will also be training specialists, promoting the cybercrime fight, and doing a whole lot of other helpful stuff in the name of ww-security for the www.

This opening really is no less than monumentally significant. Up until now cyber-villains have been running amok in part due to a lack of unity among national law enforcement bodies – aka different jurisdictions not talking too much with one another. Like the classic FBI vs. CIA vs. regular cops thing that’s been shown in Hollywood movies since the year dot. But this is real folks! Example:

Late last year one cop was asking us for the contact details of certain other cops from a different country! Asking us! Of course – it should be the other way round: all cops knowing each other and their passing on our contact details when they need some cyber-expertise! Indeed, the two systems’ coexistence (the cybercrims’ one without borders, and state cyber-police’s within the jurisdictions of national borders, or, at best, within the European border) has always been a problem. And it’s only gotten worse over the past 15 years or so – with increasingly brazen cyber-swine doing their stuff practically with impunity. Some of them have been caught and punished, but in the main, those were just the tip of the iceberg.

What makes last week’s event in Singapore even more special for us is that the IGCI was opened with our active participation plus support of various kinds – organizational, consultative, financial, and even personnel. For example, one of our top experts, V.K., is now our assigned ‘man in Singapore’, having been living in the city state and working with INTERPOL for several months already, and set to continue for much longer. He’s helping his INTERPOL colleagues develop and deepen their cyber-knowledge and practical cyber-skills, and even takes part in ongoing investigations. And he’s as happy as a sand boy.

V.K. minus the trademark Mohican

Read on: INTERPOL can party too…

Ireland does IT real well – it both understands it and supports it. But it doesn’t just attract and help out ‘adult’ tech businesses, it also does its bit with IT-incubators and supporting  IT startups. But I waxed lyrical about all that a year ago.

// Ireland’s also seriously into pharmaceuticals, but I won’t be discussing that today. Pharmaceticals to me are like a parallel universe (and the term ‘pharma’ mostly reminds me of the illegal drugs trade on the Internet.

So here I was at the Web Summit exhibition-conference in Dublin, November 2014.

Among other things, Web Summit is a yearly gathering for all sorts of different IT-startups, which come here in search of partners and investors. It really is the place to come if you’re a budding IT ‘infant’-company with loads of ideas and plans and dreams but no money. IT-infants (plus investors and large business) come here from all over the world.

Here’s what it looks like:

Nano-stands :)

Read on: I see pink sheeps!!…