IBM proudly supports the next generation of Technology Professionals
Grand Central Tech (GCT) had their inaugural Innovation Night following their new successful 6 weeks internship program. The innovative program is meant to facilitate technology education by offering high school and college students real work experience at real startups. The startups were from GCT's second year class, which has already raised 7 million USD in venture funding. NYC currently has 300,000 technology positions and in the next 5 years, it is estimated the US will have 1 million open tech jobs, so training the next generation of technology professionals will be critical to continued growth. With these dynamics in mind, Eddie Cullen (previously at Fordham University's accelerator), set out to design the GCT internship program.
On Innovation night, the Goldman Sachs auditorium was packed with interns, startups, and proud family. Interns were matched up with GCT startups based on skills and interests. The intern's backgrounds ranged from high school students with interests in technology, to college computer science majors. Students created projects that spanned from non-profit shoe donations, IoT data stream (IOBeam), payment platforms (Arthur) to 3D printing projects (Source3). However, the real outcome of these 19 startups and 33 students were the indelible memories and valuable real life work experience.
Words like creativity, perseverance, innovation, and great code were used to describe the outcomes of the program. Nurturing the next generation of tech entrepreneurs benefits NYC, the economy and creates better lives for all. Most of the students started the program with fledgling technical skills. However at the event most interns prided themselves to have learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript, creating web forms and simple mobile applications. A few students even went above and beyond, chasing leads and customer, successfully demonstrating mastery of advanced tech skills, and thriving in the fast paced reality of a genuine startup.
IBM is a corporate sponsor of GCT. IBM Cloud Ecosystem Development makes available business and technical support to GCT startups and offers Bluemix for cloud apps and services. IBM is also part of Digital.NYC initiative, a unique public/private partnership between the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, Gust, and over a dozen leading NYC-based technology and media companies..
Introducing IBM Cloud Developer Certification in India!
What do you get when you take a skilled cloud developer, an open by design cloud architecture, and IBM professional certification? You get the new Cloud Application Developer Certification program! http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/certs/50001601.shtml
Today, I'm announcing the launch of a very special new program which offers significant benefits to both developers and business. We are creating campaigns customized around the geographic needs and opportunities of developers, starting in India, to accelerate the adoption of the certification program. Stay tuned as we progress delivery and enablement worldwide in October.
Through this new program, all developers will be able to showcase their expertise by designing, developing and deploying secure applications using open technologies, to the IBM Cloud. For systems integrators, the program allows them to convey their differentiation to customers in creating open Cloud solutions. Business, too, will realize the benefits of this program as it will help to quickly identify developers who have proven that they have the skills to deliver scalable, secure and open Cloud solutions. As IBM's Cloud integration platform, Bluemix competencies will play a central role in the certification content.
So, if you're interested in
- Planning and implementing secure, cloud-ready apps
- Enhancing your cloud apps with managed services
- Using devOps services and tools to manage apps
...then, come get certified using the Cloud Application Developer Certification program to showcase what you can do!
Interested? Learn more, today! http://www-03.ibm.com/certify/tests/objC5020-285.shtml
BlueMix Winners from the NASA Challenge!
During the NASA challenge, we named IBM BlueMix most Innovative solutions. For the most innovative use of IBM Bluemix per City participating they received $12K of Cloud credit and if the winning team is a qualified startup, they will be granted up to $120K of Cloud credit in addition to up to 80 hours of technical support and assistance over 6 months by an senior IBM Bluemix developer.
Judging criteria
• Application originality and uniqueness: 25%
• Usage of Bluemix services and runtimes: 25%
• Solution completeness: 25%
• Business value: 25%
Drum roll please .. and the winners are:
Boston: Asteroid Heroes
Alex Huang, Korina Ysabel, and Mohib Hassan
They developed a solution to help classify asteroids. Today this is a manual process requiring hundreds of hours from volunteers. This solution provides an automated mechanism using pattern recognition on existing photometric data and then displays the results visually in a graph. It should save countless hours of manual drudge work. Used the Node.js runtime on Bluemix.
Carmel: Launch Window
Mr Jarvis works for Software Engineering Professionals service organization providing market research, software developers and operations professionals to clients. His solution used the Ruby Sinatra runtime and the Mongodb service to provide a website hosting video (the SpaceX CRS-6 rocket launch from Nasa Public videos)) and a social media response mechanism to allow comments.
Glasgow- Tie! Two Winners: Icarus and Lost in Space
1. Icarus (Javier Herrera) used the Python runtime to deploy a website that allows you to find the International Space Station from whatever location you choose, giving you the direction and inclination in the sky to find the station.
2. Lost in Space (Jamie Stevenson, student) also addressed the International Space Station. They used the Ruby on Rails runtime with a PostgreSQL plug-in to get the Nasa data and returning a visual representation of the ISS orbiting the earth, allowing you to find and get more information on the various station modules.
Irvine: Water Matters
Quan Chau
Used the Node.js runtime and the MongoLab service to analyze data to help track water usage and drought conditions on the planet.
Instanbul: NTD - Natural Threat Determiners
Eray Hangul used the PHP runtime and the mysql service to display a catalog of earth hazards which you can view by type (atmosphere, land, etc) and date.
La Paz: Fanatic Code
Amilkar Shegrid Contreras Castro used the node.js runtime to display set of asteroids orbiting the sun at a distance that makes them a threat to earth. If you move your mouse over an asteroid, you get details on the asteroid (name, orbital radius, period, etc) and comets that
London- Tie! Two Winners: Space Watch and The Great British Space Race
Space Watch used the Node.js runtime, MQ Light, Mobile Application Security and the Android SDK to deploy a mobile app that allows a user to find objects in the night sky.
The Great British Space Race used the Node.js runtime and wanted to use Cloudant to persist their data, but ran out of time. Their solution allows you to compare your travel time to the speed of the New Horizons probe currently en route to Pluto (the fastest spacecraft ever launched from earth).
Madrid: Kepler Quest
Carlos Hayek used Node.js runtime, Push service and the sql database to create a game (similar to flappy birds) where you attempt to keep your spacecraft from running into various stellar objects.
Nairobi: eyeSpace
Nicolas Kisundu connected to a cloud hosting service which contained images and audio recordings and then used mysql and twilio services to do some twitter analysis and display all this on the screen.
New York City: FirstHand
Jesse Lee wrote a solution was using the Node.js runtime and the Node-RED service to gather sensor data from a special glove and its android controller. They hope to expand their use of Bluemix to utilize some of our analytics services in the future.
Noordwijk: Load Interactive
Davide Ricardo, Joao Abrantes, Gil Filipe, Florian Olivera
Used the Node.js runtime, android sdk, watson speech to text personality insights, and the PHP runtime to analyze speech patterns of streamed nasa content (astronauts, launches, etc).
Pasadena: CatSat
Brian Cottrell created a game using the gamification service where you take a satellite view of the earth and identify and discover natural events as they occur in your field of view.
Sao Paulo: Maintaining Life in Space With The Most Important Ogranism Based on a Story From Rivers and Oceans
no details, on-site mentors awarded prize
And finally our Virtual Winner:
Kelana Jaya (Malaysia): canyousee created a game using the Node.js runtime, redis and mongolab to allow users to practice spotting special events (wildfires, volcanoes, etc) so they can then analyze real time feeds from NASA!
Internet of Things: Inventors and Operators
As a continuation of the Internal of Things discussion yesterday, our second key idea I’d like to discuss is that there are two basic groups of IoT use cases. One is centered around enterprises and entrepreneurs looking to invent new IoT products or services, and the other focused on those looking to optimize their operations. And the truth is that many of our clients, the businesses who stand to gain or lose the most based on their IoT strategy, represent both roles. They are inventors, and they are operators as well.
Let’s say you’re looking to invent new IoT offerings. You must invent and innovate and improve products with interconnections in mind. Think about the type of data those products are generating or are capable of generating.
What new connections are you making, and how will you capitalize on those connections? How will you use the data? What insights are you able to uncover, and how will you leverage them to do what you do better? What new capabilities will the data enable?
There’s a new app, one of the winners of our SportsHack Challenge this year at Impact, that is capable of mapping crime data to create safe run routes, allowing runners to determine where the safest nearby areas are to run, anywhere in the world. Clever stuff.
And to be clear, all innovations or inventions are not focused on an app or product or service itself. Some of the better, more significant innovations over the last few years are focused on evolving or transforming the way people interact with those things. Or on how products and services interact with other devices or organizations.
An example is how Yarra Trams is using IBM big data, mobile, analytics and cloud technology to improve service reliability and get passengers where they need to be, faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Or maybe you are focused on optimizing your operations, bringing things together to create new value. Doesn’t matter if it’s a global supply chain, a production line, a fleet of rental cars or a server farm. And the irony is that today, a fleet of cars actually isn’t that different from a server farm—just on wheels.
Being an operator is about creating the system using technology from multiple vendors and then analyzing, synthesizing and optimizing, fighting to make it work better, more seamlessly, more fluidly.
The new connected car IBM will be working on with Toyota is an excellent example, where these guys are transforming everyday vehicles to gather all sorts of data that can adjust the suspension to accommodate road conditions, send drivers text alerts in real time about inclement weather and so much more.
As an example, we (IBM) helped the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC WASA) integrate advanced analytics with asset management software to reduce downtime with predictive maintenance on its aging infrastructure. DC WASA instrumented thousands of water meters with automated meter reading technology that enables the Authority to use data to create a deeper understanding of usage patterns to provide citizens with more sophisticated pricing and demand response options.
Or maybe you’re both an inventor and an operator.
The point is simply that it’s important to understand the primary IoT use cases, and it’s also important that you know exactly how you or your clients fit into those use cases to build the right strategy for optimizing the IoT.
Tomorrow I will discuss the level of relationship and hierarchy around technology. But really, this point is less about prioritization and more about understanding how the pieces of your infrastructure puzzle fit together to bring you the best big picture the IoT has to offer. The IoT is the next concentric circle around the cloud. And of course, it is populated by things. But it’s also populated with people.