Surpassing all projections, GSMA Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest and most influential mobile event, had a record-breaking 93,000+ attendees from 200 countries.

Hosted in the Mobile World Capital Barcelona for the 10th year, Mobile World Congress 2015 attendees were treated to a wealth of learning and networking opportunities; product showcases and announcements; inspiration and innovation.

MWC 2015

Norbert Sagnard a man of many hats talks about the Northern Ireland pavillion at MWC, what kind of startups they were hosting ie. security; what it takes to succeed in Northern Ireland and how the state is helping startups get off their feet with grants, schemes and accelerators. He goes on to talk about his own investment interests and the opportunities he sees in the mobile and technology fields. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

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TTC #139 Investing in Northern Ireland and Mobile Startups, Norbert Sagnard

Peter Chau, Chief Executive for the newly formed China Connected Health Alliance talks about the need behind the formation of the new alliance and how their European counterpart will be able to pass on their experience and provide access to its existing members. He goes on to describe the Chinese health status and how the government is taking actions and policies for change; the opportunities available for foreign companies within this broad market and amongst the 600 million Chinese users of smartphones. He finishes off with some good advice on how to go about doing business in China. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #138 Tackling the Chinese Health Challenges and Opportunities, Peter Chau

Brian O’Connor picks up the thread from the eHealth Forum in Athens and the legacy that was created there leading to an expansion of new country members and stakeholders. They have created over 25 ecosystems that include governments and industry members with over 15000 organisations involved, and more than 100 meetings, yearly. He explains how ECHAlliance came about to helping in the creation of the China Connected Health Alliance upon the request of the Chinese Health Minister and what the Great Leap Forward is all about. He analyses what it takes to do business in health within China and where ECHAlliance is aiming for in the future. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

TTC #140 We make collaboration in Health work, Brian O'Connor

Guy Martin, Senior Strategist at Samsung Open Source Group and Head of Digital Marketing at Open Interconnect Consortium explains how OIC intends to connect the next 50 billion devices that will make up the Internet of Things. What the need was and how some of the members like Samsung, Intel, Cisco, HP, GE Software have realised that there is not much differentiation in intellectual property but mostly infrastructure. Which means building the Standards and specifications through OIC and the open source code and reference implementation of the standard within the Iotivity project, which is hosted at the Linux Foundation; OIC funds the project. Guy predicts which verticals will be the next big thing in IoT, including smarthome and industry and he answers on a personal level what his opinion is on data protection. Kimberley Lewis, Marketing Program Manager for Standards and Advanced Technologies at Intel was present during the interview and fully aligned with Guy’s responses, judging from her nodding of the head. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

TTC #141 Common Standards For The Next 50B Devices In Internet Of Things, Guy Martin

David O’Neill describes how Seattle based APImetrics offers the industry’s first and only intelligent, analytics-driven API performance solution built specifically for the enterprise. He explains what the current problems are with APIs are and how companies need to monitor their APIs with analytics, receive alerts and take action in order to meet service level agreements(SLAs) and customer expectations. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

TTC #142 When APIs Need To Meet SLAs, David O’Neill

Ben Bickford talks about his work as a consultant combining technology flavours and organisational goals. His interest in big data or ‘big insights’ as he says, customer behaviour and how the companies can use the information to grow. He describes how he follows the entrepreneurial spirit and how he believes that the future is the combination of existing technologies bringing them together in a novel way and how mobile is part of the whole value chain. Ben suggests developers look into opportunities within the corporate sector and how they can solve problems by creating B2B solutions. He goes on to talk more about his extraordinary life, how he started trading from highschool, what he learned and how he never took the easy path to expansion. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

TTC #143 A Combination Of Science And Art, Ben Bickford

Zac Jacobs co-director of the multi-award winning company Millipede and creator of Dumb Ways to Die 2, the no.1 game in 81 countries, with over 45M downloads, talks about his company, the team and what it takes to be so successful. He talks about the thought process that goes in game development; what game developers should search for and why it is almost impossible to find women game programmers although female players are the significant proportion (65%) of game users. He goes on to talk about investing in startups, trends he sees in the future and what it means to grow as a startup in Australia. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

TTC #149 Why Aren’t There Women Game Developers Despite The 65% Female Game Users, Zac Jacobs

Philip Verschueren, founder at iCapps talks about their new application, MoveBattle, fueled by wearables and the Apple Health Kit. Their moto is Move as a team and beat the others! An application with a gamification process that he hopes will make fitness and basic training fun and a collective process, that will motivate everyone on the team to participate and in general meet their fitness goals. He hopes to engage employees in companies to exercise more and eventually implement a hosting platform for everyone’s data to be served there.  He explains why the company is looking for funding and what they hoped to achieve through their presence at 4YFN. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central. 

TTC #148 We Want People To Move More, Philip Verschueren

Mark Dunson, President of Emerson Climate and Mobeen Khan, AVP of Industrial IoT Solutions at AT&T come together in this interview to explain how Emerson Climate is currently leveraging AT&T’s IoT services for their vision of the connected kitchen. Mark talks about their big expertise in the air condition & refrigeration sectors and how they are using AT&T’s knowledge and infrastructure to serve their large clientele in the connected kitchen focusing on maintenance costs, food integrity and labor costs. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #146 Implementing The Connected Kitchen, Mark Dunson and Mobeen Khan

Ian Parness and Brad Folkens explain how the difficulty of searching on the mobile led to the creation of Camfind; a mobile application that returns results for anything you snap an image of, ranging from a lady’s handbag to a living animal. Ian mentions the interest they have received from companies to integrate their product into their own platforms, mainly retail for product matching, price comparison, but also stock photography vendors or even applications for the visually impaired. Brad explains how valuable their app is with over 11 patents filed; how it always returns results (successful image recognition 100% to a varying degree of detail); what their revenue model is and how their $5M funding will help the product develop.  The third founder, Dominik Mazur, was mentioned but not present at the interview. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.

TTC #144 Image Search That Always Returns Results, Ian Parness and Brad Folkens

Helen and friends of Heroes of the Mobile Fringe organised the Choons ‘n chat conversation in parallel with the Fringe activities and Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona; Helen Keegan, Mobile Strategist & founder at Heroes of the Mobile Fringe; Rosa Aguilar, Fitbit; Carlo Longino, WIP.org; Rafe Blandford, Mobile Strategist at DigitasLBi, Kirsta Styles, Tech Journalist at TechCityNews and a few more friends got together in Barcelona during the MWC15 and talked about the future of mobile, needs, potential fields of development, applications and how it all needs to reach the ordinary people. The podcast was moderated by Vicki Kolovou and Sakis Triantafyllakis for Tech Talks Central. Yannis Rizopoulos, host for Tech Talks Central made sure everything was recorded on video.

TTC #147  Choons ‘n Chat With Helen Keegan And Friends

James Tagg, author of the book ‘Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?’ presented in front of an audience his own beliefs on the Singularity issue. He started out by answering his own question ‘Can a Machine think Creatively?’ and argued mathematically on how much artificial intelligence has progressed, which are the crucial parity point dates and why he doesn’t believe that machines can surpass the creativity of humans. The speech was conducted during a Heroes of Mobile event organised by its founder Helen Keegan, on the 2nd of March at the Talent Garden(TAG).


TTC #145 Are The Androids Dreaming Yet, James Tagg

Kari Kohtamaki, Account Manager for Wellness & Healthcare Technologies at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, explains how VTT is a multi disciplined applied research institute owned by the Finnish Government, employing over 2600 research scientists. He talks about the ECHAlliance and how it’s popularity within Europe can help research institutes collaborate with stakeholders. Kari goes on to describe the development in the eHealth sector within the Scandinavian countries, the opportunities and the challenges that need to be addressed; how easy it is to collaborate with countries in the South of Europe and how the new market of China offers a new test bed for research. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #150 A Need to Re-engineer the Processes in Healthcare, Kari Kohtamaki

Peter Margaris, Head of Service Provider Product Marketing at F5 Networks talks about his company & the infrastructure solutions they provide to service providers to optimize their application performance, traffic and signal management including security solutions and NFE infrastructure. Collaborating already with 9 out of 10 of the largest global operators and many smaller ones they already foresee the impact the data created by IoT will put on service provider networks, surpassing that of wireless or smartphones. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #151 How IoT will add pressure on Service Provider Networks, Peter Margaris

Valerie Riffaud Cangelosi, New Market Development Manager for Epson Europe starts by explaining why Epson is not only about printers and projectors. Her own main focus is the sensing technologies and wearables Epson is developing, like the Android based smart glasses or wrist watch that monitors heart pulse. She mentions health projects they’re collaborating on with hospitals from Lombardia and how they’re trying to provide solutions. Valerie talks, also, about how education and the students themselves are integrating technology.  Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #152 Devices that are changing Patient Care and Education, Valerie Riffaud Cangelosi

Costis Papadimitrakopoulos, CEO of Globo presents GLOBO, an international leader and technology innovator delivering multi-platform enterprise mobility management and telecom software solutions. He talks about the significance of security in the era of IoT and how his company is evolving it’s product architecture to offer security of data and better management of devices. He also adds that their future plans are to provide their software as open source in order to create a larger ecosystem. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #153 IoT will need Security of Data & better Management of Devices, Costis Papadimitrakopoulos

Filip Maertens, Founder and Chief Product Officer of Sentiance a Belgian B2B startup that builds a rich contextual profile on the true behaviour of a user by using the built-in sensors of his/her mobile or wearables. As the company moto goes it makes Smart devices intelligent! Their product is a software development kit with revenues from daily active users. Filip mentions how they were surprised to find that the industry with the biggest interest in their product was the insurance companies since they want to know about our driving behaviour. He goes on to talk about their $2M funding, expanding to Asia and the US, the IPs involved in their product, data, artificial intelligence and the...singularity theory. One of the most interesting interviews to come out of MWC15. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks central.


TTC #154 Context Aware Technology Provider with High Accuracy, Filip Maertens

Trimaps converts any classic image map to an actual digital interactive map with geolocation. Jonathan Falon, founder at Trimaps, explains how the application works on mobiles and how it can be used for hotels, recreation parks, golf courses and many more. They have an API for website use and an SDK for developers. Jonathan talks about their monetization model, their team and how they utilized their initial seed funding. He goes on to explain the use of their other product, called Tricount, which enables a group of friends to organise their group expenses. Balancing or ‘going Dutch’ on travel expenses and with a good initial number of users in 3 countries. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #155 Converting Paper Maps into Digital with Geolocation, Jonathan Falon

Jorge Fernandez Miranda, Global Health of Consumer Digital Health B2C at Telefonica talks about the number one Spanish multinational Telco and how they hope to transform healthcare through three basic areas, a. the digital hospital & transforming healthcare processes, b. population health management, changing the way healthcare is delivered (remote management & telemedicine) and c. consumer digital health services. He mentions that very few telcos are approaching the end-consumer market, while Telefonica has already launched in Latin America with over 2M subscribed users. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #156 Discovering New Markets & Services in Healthcare, Jorge Fernandez Miranda

Leslie Cottenje, coFounder at the Belgian startup ‘Hello Customer’ talks about their B2B service which keeps things simple by asking one question Would you recommend such product or company to your friends or family? With their second open question they offer text and sentiment analysis, taking away the burden from their customers of surveying, analysing and storing of customer feedback. Leslie explains how she wants to help companies listen to their customers and how her own company is growing with partners from the retail and consulting sectors. Interviewed by Vicki Kolovou for Tech Talks Central.


TTC #157 Enriching CRM Data with Customer Voice and Emotions, Leslie Cottenje

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