NASA and Sesame Street meet at ITEX 2012

Media Release
29 October 2012

NASA and Sesame Street meet at ITEX 2012

Thought leaders from New Zealand and abroad will share insight into the industry that is shaping the way we live and do business at ITEX on 8 November at the Viaduct Events Centre Auckland.

Keynote speakers at this year’s business technology show have been sourced to deliver the most relevant content to our local industry professionals and will provide insight into some of the top issues facing IT managers today.

Dr Jeffrey Cole, from the University of Southern California, has been at the forefront of media and communication technology policy issues in both the United States and internationally for the past 25 years. He has testified before Congress on media related topics and spoken at numerous conferences on communications issues. His long-term study on the impact of computers, the internet and related technologies on families and society has been running in over 30 countries. The objective is to coordinate a truly international effort to understand how both industrialised and non-industrialised countries are affected by the use of information technology.

Noah Broadwater is CTO at Sesame Workshop (the company behind Sesame Street) and is a recognised pioneer in contextual media, open source, virtualisation, and cloud computing. Aside from leading successful strategic IT initiatives, he also advises on consumer focused products, giving him a unique perspective on the impact of the consumerisation of IT; the growing tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business and government organisations. The emergence of consumer markets as the primary driver of information technology innovation is seen as a major IT industry shift, as large business and government organisations dominated the early decades of computer usage and development.

Chris Mattmann, from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has a wealth of experience in software design and in the construction of large-scale data-intensive systems. His work has influenced a broad set of communities, ranging from helping NASA unlock data from its next generation of earth science system satellites, to assisting graduate students at the University of Southern California in the study of software architecture. Chris will be speaking about how NASA manages large amounts of data to make it usable – very applicable for businesses today with two of the hottest topics for IT professionals being around data management (business intelligence and Big Data).

Jamie Fitzgerald was the first ever Kiwi to reach the South Pole unsupported on foot with fellow adventurer Kevin Biggar, attracting media attention world-wide as they implemented a ‘business-like’ approach to their 52-day expedition. Jamie will talk about how they used technology on their voyage of survival against the odds.

The ITEX event will flow into the ITEX Computerworld awards cocktail party on
8 November at The Viaduct Events Centre in Auckland.

Ends

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