MLOVE confestival 2015
For the first time in the history of MLOVE, the ConFestival took place at the newly build Future City Campus in Hamburg HafenCity. The temporary FutureCity Campus is an installation built out of sea containers filled with inventions, workshops and exhibitions. 2015 ConFestival featured industrial, cool space and innovative topics and speakers ranging from Internet of Things, to Smart Cities, Mobility and Smart Home.
Experiences
This year’s ConFestival was not only about being inspired by great talks and the atmosphere, but also about taking part in the presentation of the latest technologies.
CopterProject entertained the crowd with their drones and visitors on campus could also play with silkscreeen printing of MLOVE t-shirts, organized by Bordsteinschwalbe.
Avant-guarde 3D printed smart fashion pieces could be seen and tried on in the Fashion PopUp Store from PopUp Fashion Berlin and curious ones could learn more about smart e – scooter technologies, developed by Floatility. Atmosphere was completed with VJ artistry by Prismo, projected on the latest model of the Audi’s S1, accompanied by beautiful Audi e-tron.
Startup Competition
Naturally, this year’s startup competition was supported by experienced judges from all branches of technology: Nikolaus Röttger, WIRED; Tristan Reckhaus, IBM; Joel Curado Silveirinha, Cisco; Felicitas Hackman, VentureVillage; Kai Iwasaki, Embassy; Max Laemmle, Better Payment; Hannes Fehr (mentor @ telekom Hub:raum and other accelerators).
There was diversity in the presentation from urban farming to new mobility concepts, and from trash cans to big data solutions. The competition, as per usual, was incredibly strong.
It was a true challenge to pick a winning trio, which in this year’s rundown was: 3rd place: Floatility; 2nd place: Spice VR; 1st place: Sponsoo.
Watch the 1 minute-long ConFestival aftermovie down below:
Please find full video here. You can also find full gallery of the event on Flickr.
Speakers & Topics
The Smart City theme was thoroughly explored with the help of speakers such as Peter Hirshberg, CEO of ReImagine Group, Joel Curado from Cisco, Tristan Reckhouse from IBM, Bastian Schäfer from AirBus and Dr. Carsten Brosda from the Senatskanzlei of Hamburg. Ali Jelveh, CEO of ProtoNet covered the area of Smart Home; the topic of IOT was presented through the lens of Tom van Oudenaarden from Implantables and Dr. Christina Dicke of IXDS.
Our guests from Italy, presented the evolution and the future of Milano, one of the smartest cities in the Europe. The expert panel consisted of Marco Massarotto, Founder & Partner at Doing; Antonio Bisignano, City of Milan; Guido Arnone, EXPO 2015 S.p.A; and Antonio Mustaro, Telecom Italia.
Workshops
One of this year’s experiments is the concept of a TimeTunnel. We formed separate think-tanks that explored topics ranging from Food, Nutrition, Sustainability, Mobility, Smart games: Olympics, Arts & Culture, Fashion, and the Maker movement. We asked brilliant minds to peer into the future of next 10 years and present their findings in the physical environment of the Tunnel, in order to see interconnectedness of ideas and divergence of seemingly distant topics. TimeTunnel is a part of permanent exhibition that will only advance in the future and grow together with FutureCity Campus.
Looking into the future
The ecosystem of a city with all its logistics and management is a very smart system already. Yet, the phenomenon of the Smart City is on the forefront. Undoubtedly technology can help a lot in optimizing our cities and making them smarter. But what exactly is a smart city and who profits from it? If we want to empower citizens, we have to be smart, quick and work together as startups, government and big tech players. The future is bright – Let’s co-create it with smart ideas and brilliant minds.
