23.5.2018
On the first conference day futurist Mark Stevenson held plenary lecture 'The Future and What to do About it'.
On the first day of 12th Combis Conference in Poreč a large number of participants attended a plenary lecture powered by HT ‘The Future and What to do About it’ by one of the most respected futurists in the world Mark Stevenson. Stevenson gave to the public his predictions about the future and highlighted what changes in society are happening in terms of technology, energy, management, health and commerce. Stevenson explained why 'business as usual' is a recipe for disaster.
"If you carry on with ‘business as usual’ you’re going to be wholly unprepared for what is coming,” says Stevenson. “We are moving from the world of ‘economies of scale’ - the old world with big players, big organizations - to a world of ‘economies of distribution’ where networked solutions can now do many things far better, far cheaper, far more efficiently and closer to the customer than old hierarchies. If you are not prepared for that you can become irrelevant, no matter what business you’re in"
Among the trends and technologies that will have a huge impact on the future, Stevenson sees Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Renewable energy as potentially the most disruptive. "One of the most interesting thing about renewables is that much of the generating capacity will not be owned by big corporations. Because it’s distributed by nature there will be much more energy generated by small businesses, farms, schools and when that energy is traded over an Energy Internet, the whole power dynamic of the world will change. Also, once you have installed renewable infrastructure the marginal cost of the fuel is near zero, the wind and the sun is free – all you have to factor in is the minimal maintenance costs. That means that you have a much more stable environment for investment, because the cost of energy will be both low and predictable " said Stevenson.
Boris Drilo, Member of the Management Board and Chief Technical and Information Officer and Saša Kramar, Member of the Management Board and Chief Business Officer have participated on discussion 'First NB-IoT network in Croatia: a game changer for Internet of Things' after the first plenary lecture. They highlighted that it is expected that by 2020 more than 30 billion devices that are surrounding us daily will communicate with each other, which will be possible thanks to the Internet of Things technology that will soon become a part of our cars, homes and cities. Hrvatski Telekom has presented the first network technology in Croatia Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) at the beginning of May, and this technology will enable an extremely large number of connected IoT devices on the Croatian market in short term and insure Croatian IT companies to provide preconditions for the development of a large number of IoT solutions for domestic and foreign markets.
The other part of the first conference day brings opening of third edition of try{code}catch hackathon – 24-hours’ competition in programming for students, leisure networking and fun evening programme. Second conference day is reserved for plenty of ICT lectures, mini events and numerous business and inspirational topics.
With Conference partner Hrvatski Telekom, Combis Conference sponsors are also: platinum sponsor Cisco, gold sponsors Dell EMC and Intel, F5, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Netapp, Palo Alto Networks, Unify and Veeam Software, silver sponsor Lexmark and Microsoft Hrvatska and media sponsors ICTbusiness.info, Lider, Mreža, Netokracija, Novi list, Privredni vjesnik, tockanai.hr, tportal.hr, Večernji list and Yammat FM.
You can find more information about the Conference on the COMBIS Conference web site.
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