For Father’s Day (we live in London, so we celebrate it today, unlike in Spain which is March 19) my wife gave me the “Ultimate Father`s Day” gift, from TechCamp UK. [Thank you, love!]
It consisted of a workshop with other father-son / father-daughter “teams”, held at the Iron Yard (The Leathermarket – London), where we built a desktop arcade machine in 5 hours (including lunch break), following the directions from Tom and Tom, using the Picade set, setting up and using the Raspberry Pi, custom OS, emulators, ROMs, loudspeakers, power supply, LCD screen, etc:
Today I was invited to attend InfoSecurity Europe, Europe`s largest Information Security industry event.
As always, it was interesting to have a chance to catch up with this rapidly moving field, and a great opportunity to chat with old friends.
Apart from gimmicks (VR everywhere, car racing and helicopter simulators, giant robots, etc), swag (all kinds of Star Wars and other Sci-Fi related giveaways, from toys to t-shirts) and junk food (from candy to icecream to chips, the booths did not have healthy alternatives, although the food vendors did), the most interesting part of these events is always the talks, specifically the hands-on demos.
Today I was invited, along with my son, who at 14 has been a videogame developer for years, to attend the Intel Buzz videogame developer workshop. It was not only a lot of fun, but WONDERFUL to attend with him!
Although a small event, it ended up being extremely interesting, with an area to try indie games and new technologies, and a long list of talks and panels, including one-on-ones.
I spent Wednesday evening and most of Thursday in Zürich.
On Wednesday I had dinner with some business partners; “business as usual”.
But on Thursday, after my business presentation to potential customers, I had the very rare and exclusive opportunity to visit one of the main data centers in Switzerland. Here are some impressive facts about them:
they host 1/3 of Swiss banks data internet traffic = 40% of Switzerland’s internet traffic energy bill = 2 million Swiss Franks per annum 2 different energy suppliers from 2 different access points, with preferential oil supply in case of a failure (full reserves for 5 days for the generators) almost 50 telecoms suppliers, from many different countries, providing direct access for their customers worldwide RFIDs paired with 3D fingerprint scanners which measure the fingerprint but also the morphology, pulse and temperature separate isolated room to open packages, to minimize the risk of fire single person magnetic doors temperature, movement, and sound sensors double-gated entrance even to the parking lot!
This past winter I met Sandy and James from Open ITP in New York, and Pepe from Valencia. They were organizing the Circumvention Tech Festival to be held in Las Naves, Valencia (Spain) March 1-6.
They invited me to give a talk, which was eventually scheduled for March 4th at 3pm. I titled the talk “When privacy does not mean the same to you and me”. It was meant to generate debate, to expose other people’s points of view, rather than to be a unidirectional speech.
On Monday, February 9, I attended a Bitcoin – Blockchain event with my wife at law firm Latham & Watkins in New York, organized by Hedgeable.
Over 100 bitcoin enthusiasts, investors, journalists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs networking over food and beverages, with demos from:
and a round table of Bitcoin innovation experts:
Since I have already started researching the application of the block chain technology for healthcare, it was quite a useful event.
