Conference News: What I learned this week – December 16

Starting Up America: Startup consultant Anne Wessing launched an initiative last week to bring 100 tech founders to 100 rural communities across the country in Q1 2017.  This series of conversations has been dubbed “Starting Up America.” Its goal is to “allow rural Americans and urban tech professionals to gain much needed exposure to each other,” after the 2016 US election illustrated how divided our country is right now.  Several opportunities to get involved may be found here.

RSA’s New Additions: RSA Conference has made a few exciting changes to the 2017 event. The sessions are expanding beyond the Moscone Center to include content, such as the CyBeer Ops tasting, SANS Netwars, the ICS and IoT Sandbox, in the nearby Marriott Marquis. The event has also announced the inclusion of the RSAC Early Stage Expo. This Expo will allow attendees to meet with emerging startups and learn about their innovations. To see the entire agenda, click here.

Speaking Opportunity: Open Networking Summit 2017 (ONS) has opened a formal call for speakers. Taking place in Santa Clara from 3 – 6 April, ONS will gather more than 2,000 attendees who are developers and network architects, carriers and cloud service providers, vendors, start-ups and investors. The conference planning team is interested in hearing “a diverse range of topics related to SDN and NFV to help lead the conversation sharing, knowledge and expertise with the community.” The deadline to submit a speaker proposal is 21 January.

Lunchtime Learning: TV of Tomorrow Show’s 10th-Anniversary Celebration culminated at their annual New York event last week. The East Coast event is a highly focused, dialog-driven, one-day “intensive” version of the flagship West Coast conference. During your next lunch break, hear from the companies, entrepreneurs and technologists who are “building the TV and video platforms of tomorrow” via their video portal.

Coming Up Next:  Santa is coming!