South Sound Technology conference

I went to this event partially out of interest and the hope of network, but I also attended due to the fact that I would receive extra credit for writing a blog post about it. However, I was not informed that you had to pay for the event! I hope that I will receive a decent amount of extra credit, due to the fact that it essentially cost me 20$. The fact that as a student of the school I had to pay to attend was made worse by the fact, that other students informed that I could have got in for free. Fellow students said that Professor Fry put them on the list of attendees at no cost. Unfortunately, Professor Fry made no mention of this the day before the event.

The first part of the event was a presentation by Sharon Wong from Cisco. Her presentation was interesting, but it did not seem to be a very cohesive presentation. Her theme was roughly that in the future everything will be connected to the internet. Other than that, I don't really know what she was trying to get at. Her presentation bounced around from ideas about innovation to how everything will have internet. Ultimately it was interesting, but I don't really know what it was about. Her presentation contained nuggets of value but as a whole was forgettable.

Next was a presentation on Big Data that can be summed up in this context: "We have a lot of data, but we need to figure out how to use it." That was pretty much it. I think the speakers were trying to convince the audience of the uses of big data by talking about uses that are not yet in place. I think the presentation would have had more validity if there was some empirical data.

Next I went to the Cybersecurity and Big Data panel. This panel quickly degenerated in to a pissing match between individuals in the audience vs. the panel over who knows more about cybersecurity. I feel as thought the panel represented individuals that provide physical security of data while most of the audience members dealt with cyber security of data.

The lunch keynote was Mike Hamilton, which was probably the most entertaining presentation. However I didn't really care for Mike's bravado. He seemed to be trying to show the audience how much of a badass he is when he probably could have just told us some stories of the experiences he has had in the field. This would have allowed me to decide if Mike was really as cool as he said he was rather then him just telling me how much of a big deal he is. Ultimately, Mike's presentation was about how the South Sound could be a great hub for cybersecurity if a few things happen.

Finally, having been burned by the first breakout, I decided to skip "Building a Cybersecurity Workforce" and go to the entrepreneur meet up. This event was kinda fun to be a part of and listen in on. It seemed as though there were some individuals there looking for guidance from other ents. and then one dude that wanted people to lease his office space. I wanted to talk to the president of Internet Identity but did not get a chance too.