Last week I was lucky enough to participate in an Inspiration Day hosted by Mi-Idea at the Bright Building in Manchester.
The Technical Innovation project is the annual flagship event for Nationwide’s Technical Development Programme (TDP) and Transformation Community Development Programme (TCDP). As part of the program, which is run in collaboration with Capgemini, Cisco and IBM, Mi-Idea hosted an inspiration day during which, thirty of Nationwide’s best IT graduate employees were presented with Cisco’s innovation story and projects.
The morning was filled with sessions from the various partners. The attendees were able to learn all about Mi-Idea and CityVerve. They also attended a presentation from Capgemini on simplification and AI, and had the chance to build some cognitive chatbots and visual recognition machine learning models with IBM.
In the afternoon, the attendees were split into smaller groups and got to spend time with each of the Mi-Idea start-ups, including yours truly.
It was great to have the opportunity to talk to a new generation of innovative thinkers about Hark. We talked about where Hark started, and some of the early hardware, through to where we are now and our future plans. More importantly, we were able to demonstrate what the Hark platform can do. We setup some demo hardware and live monitored the temperature, humidity and CO2 levels in the Bright Building. We were then able to show this data being collected and presented it in real time via the Hark platform.
It was a really fun day! It was great to have hopefully inspired a group of young people just starting their careers, and to show what is possible with today’s technology.
