Friday 15 November 2013

Report from ICT2013 - Vilnius

As we reported a while ago the MobiCloud consortium was selected by the European Commission to present the latest advances in mobile cloud technologies at ICT2013. This event was held  in Vilnius, Lithuania on 6-8 of November. It was an excellent opportunity to network with researchers and industrial partners, as well as to disseminate the first year project results.

MobiCloud booth in Hall4, Xone R3 industry & business for tomorrow
From left to right. The MobiCloud Team: Vladimir Bataev & Patrick Okkersen (EsperantoXL),
Maria Tsakali (EC project officer), Xavier Aubry (Appear) & Manu Auch (Nettropolis)

An impressive turnout of almost 5000 attendees was present as the president of Lithuania took to the stage to introduce the event.

On the MobiCloud booth, the team showed demonstrations of the ongoing trials: a mobile site diary application for the construction industry built in collaboration with Costain in the UK and a suite of workforce apps for the public transport industry built for Tågkompaniet in Sweden.  

Around 100 visitors expressed interest in following the MobiCloud project results and accessing the MobiCloud SDK, now available publicly. It is also possible to try out the site diary app for free for 30 days in your own operations. A large Polish construction group took advantage of this opportunity to test the power of mobile cloud applications for their own business.

MobiCloud was also represented in the networking sessions, with Xavier Aubry, MobiCloud project coordinator, speaking at the CloudWatch networking session. This session presented examples of existing cloud apps success stories and discussed how Europe can boost the competitiveness of its industries and SMEs with cloud computing. Thank you to our colleagues at CloudWatch for inviting us!

Xavier Aubry (MobiCloud project coordinator) presenting at the CloudWATCH session
at ICT213,  illustrating how the power of the cloud can be leveraged by SME's to serve
large customers in the construction and public transport industries

The MobiCloud was actively networking with other projects and was recruited during the event to join the beta program of E*Xelerator , a virtual eccelerator initiated by the European Alliance for Innovatioin.

Finally the event was a great opportunity to discover the ICT work programme 2014-2015 of Horizon 2020. The first call call has a deadline on April 23rd 2014 and features key topics in the field of mobile and cloud. The team is already thinking about a new project developing the results of MobiCloud further, so if you are interested to work on joint proposals, contact us!

In summary, ICT2013 delivered over and above all our expectations!

Thursday 14 November 2013

COMIT Mobile IT Conference - London

Martin Wilson from Appear presented MobiCloud at the COMIT Mobile IT Conference at the Institute of Physics in London on 7th November to an audience of around 100 delegates. The guests included representatives from software companies, integrators, government bodies and engineering organisations focused on the use of mobile technology in the construction industry. 


Aside from Martin's update on MobiCloud and the applications that would comprise the Enterprise Appstore for Construction, other keynote presentations were delivered from Cross Rail (who are using mobile to improve the efficiency of their ambitious project to build a major rail link across London), Costain (using Building Information Modelling in their operations) and the UK government - on the implementation of BIM in a number of UK central government departments.

Martin Wilson

At the start and end of the day delegates also saw two perspectives on the evolution and future of the mobile technology applicable to civil engineering and construction - from Phil Jackson of the Institute of Civil Engineers and Franci Rabuck (Technology Research Analyst and Futurist).

MobiCloud

The content of the keynotes and speeches which included device evolution, new technology and working practices confirmed that MobiCloud's approach of using cloud, cross platform and context would be key to the future success of construction at implementing mobile technologies for the workforce.

For more information about the conference, including more photographs and the presentation slides, see COMIT's website or their blog.