India Internet of Things Week 2015 by UNICOM

Three weeks back, I received a message from my mentor, Mr. Pranav Pai Vernekar (Founder of Inventrom) saying that he would be going to a conference in Bangalore. The conference was being organized by UNICOM. The theme was: ‘Internet of Things: Link Your World’ and it was part of India Internet of Things Week 2015.

This was a corporate conference, but it was interesting and I wanted to attend the event. So I sent an email to them. The next day I got a reply from the CEO of UNICOM, Mr. Nitesh Naveen himself! He said that they would consider it and get back to me on the same. That evening, I received another email saying that they would permit me to attend the conference and would also (most kindly) waive the standard entry fee. ☺

I was jumping with joy and immediately packed my bags

My father’s friend, Gaurish Dharwadkar from Travel Shop, booked the tickets. This was to be the first time that I would travel alone. He ensured that I had a pleasant experience.

On 9^th September 2015, I boarded an Indigo flight to Bangalore. 50 minutes later I was at Kempegowda International Airport, Bangalore.

Early the next morning, I took a taxi to the conference venue: Movenpick Hotel & Spa

I pushed the door of the hall, in anticipation of what awaited me on the other side. When I entered, Mr. Axel Angeli was giving a talk on preparing for the next industrial revolution with IoT. He focused on the fact that data on a cloud is much more secure than data on a single computer. For the simple reason that new methods of encryption can be devised and also, divided data is harder to hack and steal.

The next talk was by the head of MediaTek Labs (India), Mr. Ashish Bedekar on wearable IoT.

After that came the much awaited ‘IoT Tech 10’. This is a sub-event in which companies can showcase their work in the area of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things.

The companies were:

• Emnics – Ethernet I/O card
• Atoll solutions – Bluetooth Low Energy sensing solutions
• Teamchat – Messaging platform for Machine-to-Machine, Human-to-Machine, and Machine-to-Human communication.
• Inventrom – Netplug: device which can make almost anything IoT enabled
• Leaf Technologies – AIR: a device which controls the lighting, temperature, etc. of your home according to your preferences.
• Avench – Sav i3: a battery operated system which uses Bluetooth Low Energy to wirelessly monitor a biogas plant and relay information to a smartphone.

(At the end of the event, Teamchat won the IOT Tech 10 award.)

For the next half hour, there was a networking break, followed by an hour long panel discussion on exploring the emerging technologies in IoT.

After the discussion there was a workshop held by MediaTek Labs on integrating wearable devices with IoT using their development board: LinkIt ONE

The first talk post lunch was by Bipin Pradeep Kumar (co-founder of Gaia Smart Cities) on how the Internet of Things will proliferate as a network of networks of ‘Things’.

This was followed by ‘IT to IOT’ by Pavan Kumar & Viswanadh Akella from SAP Labs India. They stressed on the power of new generation smart applications that will be based on SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) coupled with Big Data.

Abhimanyu Prabhavalkar from Oracle’s IoT Engineering sector talked about using IOT as a tool to transform business from edge to enterprise.

The last event of the day in the Technology Track was a hands-on workshop by Inventrom on the usage of Raspberry Pi in IOT. In the workshop, participants were taught basic Python coding for GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi.

At the end of the day, I took a taxi back to the place where I was staying. The next day, at around 12:00 pm, I boarded my flight back to Goa. I have to say that this was the first time that I met so many interesting people in the IT and IOT sectors, all in one place.

It was indeed, a very fruitful experience and I thank everyone at UNICOM Learning for having allowed me to attend this event.