Oh what a day !

I believe that today we collectively as a team set a new standard for conference events. We have received so many compliments about the content and the interactive format of today, that we start blushing 😉 Heartwarming as well. Thank you to all those out there for the encouragements.

Digital Identity

First half of the day was spent on digital identity, but not in the sense that we usually talk about it at SWIFT. This went way beyond PKI.

I have described this session already pretty detailed in my announcement post here: https://petervan.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/innotribe-at-sibos-digital-identity/

All the speakers delivered as expected, but i would like to single-out Doc Searls, with a talk so good, that it made me emotional. And the interactive session was mindblowing with special structures created to represent the infrastructure, a weaver that was made out of 10 mushroom chairs, and a brainstorm about a next-generation browser, not to browse pages, but to browse data. You must start wondering what we have smoked 😉

I also would like to say a couple of words on the Digital Asset Grid project, that was also the subject of the deep-dive later that day.

• We are moving from money bank to digital (assett) bank
• It’s an infrastructure play for SWIFT to offer a certified pointer system pointing at the location of digital assets and the associated usage  rights
• It’s imperative for SWIFT to expose its core competence via API’s
• This is a huge opportunity for SWIFT to be a key infrastructure player in offering an end to end hardened infrastructure and end-point to enable the seamless exchange of any sort of digital assett between any number of entities
• This is also a huge opportunity for financial institutions to plug-in to this infrastructure for offering a new set of services in the data leverage space in un-regulated data market places

We got quite some interest, but is it clear that we’ll have to do quite some internal selling and convincing to make all the benefits of such solution clear. Somebody very senior from a bank suggested that the best thing to do now is probably to build a prototype to make this game-changer more tangible and understandable.

Big Data

I believe we surprised a lot of folks with the line-up and enormous brianpower that we brought to the table here. Also here i have covered a lot of content in my previous post: https://petervan.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/innotribe-at-sibos-discovering-the-new-physics-of-big-data/

It is probably not-seen at any conference to run one big session of 3 hours like this. It was a great combination of stellar talks about:

• Data in context
• Data finds data
• Examples of big data in action

For each topic we had 2-3 ignitor speeched followed by deep dive exploration labs applying the principles of immersive learning.

• in one of them the participants had to make a puzzle
• in another they had their own computer to do simulate the concept of the SWIFT Index

All speakers surpassed our wildest expectations. Sean Park opened in a phenomenal way, Michael Chui was rock-solid. Larry, Dave and Amir succeeded in very entertaining sessions without falling in the trap of product pitching or commercials, and they made their content very relevant to the financial industry. Michael Driscoll surprised us all with the enormous sheer volume of data they analyse every day, outbeating a lot of big financial institions with probably more traditional technology. and Michael Ouliel blew everybody away when showing how intelligence services dealt with data in real-time, and applying those technologies on voice, video and other media.

But the absolute star of this session was Jeff Jonas, who had co-designed this session with Mela. The best way to describe Jonas is: ROCK + HEALTH + GAMES = GOD. Jeff is the god of Big Data.

We ran way over time, and even after 3 1/2 hours session, the audience was still hungry for more. Awesome !

Coverage:

We had again a staggering day of twitter activity. Today myself i had a lit bit less time to tweet, as i was content owner for all sessions today. But the audience really compensated for this: thanks to all you peeps out there. Somebody called me “tweetmaster”: i liked that very much, and it encourages me to continue on this path.

And Chris Skinner once more proved that he is the fasted blogger of all times. Minutes after the session, he had already this post out: http://thefinanser.co.uk/fsclub/2011/09/digital-identities-big-data-and-rogue-traders.html.

Tomorrow is a completely different day. It’s our non-technology-topics day with New Economies, Corporate Culture, Banks for a Better World. And last but not least, we will have our Start-up competion grand finale.

Peter (@petervan) from the Innotribe Team

This blog entry is cross-posted at http://innotribe.wordpress.com