Conference News: Two New Events!; Cannes Lions CFP; Talking to Resilience Conference
The Fast & the CloudNative, Tokyo Drift: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently announced its first ever KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan, scheduled 16-17 June 2025 at the Hilton Tokyo Odaiba. CNCF CTO Chris Anisczcyk explained: “Coming off of a successful KubeDay Japan event in August and the growth of the CNCJ community, we saw an engaged, inspired, and insightful community in Japan that continues to grow significantly and anticipate an exciting event next year in Tokyo.” Organizers expect around 1,000 attendees of all levels – including developers, architects, CIOs, CTOs, press, and analysts – at this inaugural conference, with community-curated sessions that span introductory content, technical talks, and open-source cultural insights.
Working IT in Nashville: In 2025, IDC and Computerworld will host Work+, a new conference that plans to cover “current trends of IT growth, hybrid work, and employee engagement” from 4-6 May in Nashville, TN. They will also use this gathering to share the results of Computerworld’s Best Places to Work survey. While the publication has highlighted the growing importance of IT professionals across organizations of all sizes and industries for decades, this will be the first time they will honor the 120+ award winners and their teams in person at a live awards ceremony.
Submission Opportunity: Self-described as “the world’s biggest festival and awards for the creative and marketing communications, entertainment, design and tech industries,” Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025 will be held 16-20 June in the eponymous French city, drawing creative leaders from agencies, brands, and media. Now until 31 December, the producers are seeking new, fresh perspectives and ideas to take the stage at Cannes Lions. There are three distinct avenues to be considered for speaking slots – one can craft a content session from scratch, be considered for an existing session, or submit an idea for the LIONS Creators Programme – and our advice is to read through the call for content carefully to understand which best applies to you or your speaker.
Conference Manager Q&A: The Resilience Conference is curated for startups, enterprise, policy, government, and investors in security, defence, and resilience. Event Co-founder Leslie Hitchcock spoke with us recently about the event’s inception and future plans.
Speaker Strategies: Why did you decide to launch the Resilience Conference? The short answer is that it needed to be done. Resilience Conference in September 2024 was the first of its kind: an event that brings together all of the stakeholders in the defence, and security technology ecosystem, who don’t usually meet. This included startups, investors, military, government, the intelligence and national security communities, and defence contractors. No one else had covered this content or convened these disparate groups. As we’re mission-driven founders dedicated to defending our democracies, we stepped up. I’m co-founding Resilience Conference with my husband, who is deeply networked into government, policy, startups, and investors; combined with my experience producing TechCrunch Disrupt and years in Silicon Valley, it just made sense for us to join together and build something new.
Speaker Strategies: What were some of the most memorable sessions from the previous event? The CTO of GCHQ (the UK equivalent of the NSA) spoke in a fireside chat, which required a lot of maneuvering to ensure the entire event was secure enough for the intelligence community to attend. Their participation necessitated the conference badges reading first name, last initial and running a parallel registration and security track to ensure the anonymity of our sensitive attendees. There was a lot of complexity, and it was absolutely worth it. A personal highlight for me was the fireside chat with Jeannette zü Furstenberg, Managing Director of General Catalyst Europe. She’s a notable investor in the industry and hearing about how she works with founders was really interesting. Even though there are more women in the venture capital and startup founder space, having that representation on our stage was special because the demographics in the defence and security industries are nowhere near parity.
Speaker Strategies: What do you love most about your job? That’s such a hard question! I love convening people. Building a platform where values-aligned people can gather is really important, especially when they are coming around a topic as critical as the future of our democracies.
Coming Up Next Week: At Fortune Brainstorm AI – which runs 9-10 December in San Francisco – leaders will examine “The New Race for AI” and unpack how to continue developing at speed and scale while also moving forward responsibly. Reuters NEXT gets underway 10 December in New York, drawing global policymakers and business leaders to tackle the greatest challenges and opportunities facing society, business, and the world at large. The International Economic Forum of the Americas holds its IEFA World Strategic Forum from 10-12 December in Miami, in association with Integra Capital and the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International University (FIU). Bloomberg’s inaugural Women, Money & Power event takes place on 10 December in London, convening influential voices in finance from around the world to debate and discuss the future of investing, asset management and banking as well as the role of women as consumers, owners & CEOs. And beginning 10 December at the Vancouver Convention Center, the 38th annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems/NeurIPS 2024 will continue its decades-long mission to facilitate the exchange of research advances in AI and machine learning.