Italy once again takes the spotlight at Maker Faire Bay Area 2018

A number of Italian makers along with the Italian Institute for Technology will be showcased on May 18-20, 2018 at the country’s Pavilion at the 13th edition of Maker Faire Bay Area, at the San Mateo Event Center in San Mateo, California. The makers cover a wide gamut of offerings ranging from robots to wearables, from food technologies to the Internet of Things and to 3-D printing. Their intent is to forge new partnerships and promote their products and services with participants and visitors.

The Italian Government sponsors the country’s Pavilion through the Italian Trade Agency which will provide support and assistance to its Italian exhibitors. The Italian Trade Agency Site dedicated to this initiative and where one can find all information on this year’s Italian participants is www.makersitalia.com.

“We are very excited to be part of Maker Faire Bay Area 2018, an initiative truly inspired by out of the box thinking. Our esteemed makers reflect in their innovative products and services those changes taking place in the world of manufacturing today”,  says Marco Saladini, Trade Commissioner of the Italian Trade Agency’s Chicago Office. “The basic paradigm is moving to a new approach, where three traditionally distinct phases collapse into one, combining design, production and sale all on site of the actual retail point. Italian makers are at the forefront of this process and we strongly believe that international exposure will help them to grow and prosper. We”, concludes Saladini, “are definitely aware of the historical significance of this new avant-garde and of its business potential, therefore we will continue to support its efforts to establish new ties with US counterparts.”

Maker Faire Bay Area is comprised of five principal areas, emphasizing electronics, 3-D printing and advanced manufacturing, robotics, education and scientific research. The 2017 edition saw over 125,000 visitors and over 1,200 maker entries. Offices in Rome and Chicago have coordinated the Italian Trade Agency’s participation at the US Faire of 12 Italian Makers along with the organizers of the Maker Faire Rome, Innova Camera. One of the exhibitors, the Italian Institute of Technology, will demonstrate its robot, called R1 - Your Personal Humanoid, to visitors at the Pavilion.

In 2017, the Agency took part at the World Maker Faire in New York where it organized and featured 15 leading Italian makers within the official Country Pavilion. The area was awarded “Best Pavilion” by the editors of Make: magazine. Following the event in New York, the Agency’s Chicago Office organized the official US delegation to Maker Faire Rome 2017. Many of the 16 US delegates conducted presentations to Faire attendees in addition to directly exhibiting at the event, one of the biggest of its kind in Europe.

For more information please contact
Bart Pascoli - Project Coordinator - ITA Chicago - T: 312-670-4360 - E-m: chicago@ice.it

MS - 18-MAY-2018

The Economist Events' Innovation Summit, London - 20th September 2018

About Innovation Summit 2018:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning has become one of the hottest topics in business. An army of startups has been funded to pursue the commercial opportunities, whilst the bosses of big companies increasingly look to implement AI strategies at scale. This has encouraged hopes of massive efficiency gains as machines learn to get ever better in their crunching of increasing volumes of data to understand what works. Yet at the same time, there have also been darker predictions, from machines taking all the jobs once done by humans (Bill Gates even wants to tax robots to slow down this shift) to possible existential threats to humanity.
Executives urgently need to develop a strategy to make their firm into a truly intelligent company. That means breaking through what now seems to be Peak Hype around AI to get to the still considerable reality.

Read more ...

Microsoft opens Shoreditch startup space Reactor

Microsoft is the latest company eyeing up London's hot shot startups with a $20m (£14.3m) investment in a new space in Shoreditch, opening today.

Reactor will host the Silicon Valley tech giant's accelerator for scale-ups, along with a space for events such as hackathons to help grow the capital's startup ecosystem.

"This is a long term investment in Britain," said Microsoft managing director for startups and scale-up programme in the UK, Warwick Hill.

"It's a good thing for UK business and to help them go global. London is the epicentre in the UK. It's a good investment for us pre and post-Brexit."

It's just the latest of several new tech spaces to pop up in the city, but Hill said it was the involvement of clients such as Vodafone, Rolls Royce and Kingfisher which will make it stand out against others that have just a single corporate backer.

London is the the first Reactor space in Europe after locations in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Microsoft is planning to open one in Sydney and is also considering launching further spaces in Europe.

"There are plans to look at Berlin, and obviously France is a big pull with Station F [startup space]," said Hill.

It's also a play to get smaller companies using Microsoft, particularly its cloud services, an area in which it is competing with Amazon and Google.

The capital is the third largest target country for its cloud business and alos has a large developer community.

More info in THE REACTOR website.

Source: http://www.cityam.com/281000/microsoft-opens-shoreditch-startup-space-reactor

https://news.microsoft.com/en-gb/2018/02/23/microsoft-unveils-20m-venue-in-london-to-help-uk-remain-a-tech-leader/

FM

23/02/2018

The Birth of Tech Nation - £21 million in funding over the next four years