Why SWIFT had to bring along 52 kilometres of cabling

So day three of SIBOS is coming to a close and I’ve found myself rushed off my feet as always, running between sessions, trying ot blog and tweet and trying to find a decent wifi hotspot.

The wifi at SIBOS is really up and down, but then I found out why: there is no wifi here!

You may think there is, but the wifi you’re using is not part of the convention centre’s wifi, it’s SWIFT’s.

SWIFT found as the Osaka date neared that the convention centre has no wifi.  Yah-boo-hiss!

So what did they do about it?

SWIFT shipped in 52 kilometres – yes, 52 kilometres or over 32 miles worth – of cabling.

SWIFT wired Osaka Convention Centre so we could be wireless.

That’s why the wifi is viable but, in an unbelievable move, the Osaka Convention Centre has told SWIFT that that’s very nice of them to do this, but they don’t want to keep it.

Are they mad?

Something strange in Japan (one of many btw).

Anyways, when you can find the wifi works, it’s pretty good and so here’s an update of Day Three afternoon.

Just spent two hours in the innotribe space where we talked a lot about big data and broke a lot of myths.

Big data is not about volume, it’s about analysis and usage.

Big data is not just a relational database, it’s far more about continual analysis.

And social media and networking is not about increasing sociability, in fact it’s the opposite.  It makes us more isolated and more insular.

You need to attend innotribe if you want to know more but, to give you a flavour, here’s a video they used to introduce the session stolen from Defrag 2011.

Defrag 2011 Intro Video from Digital Alchemy on Vimeo

Wowzer!

Innotribe’s program continues this afternoon with the launch of the Digital Asset Grid (DAG), a very important SWIFT, Sibos and innotribe moment (more later).

Anyways, after innotribe I was back on the conference room floor trying to achieve two objectives:

1)      find the best corporate gifts and giveaways; and

2)      find the funniest exhibit hall moment.

I’ll be posting about both on Friday, so watch this space.

Now it’s rushing back into the plenary room to hear about mobile payments and off to another cocktail party.

Should be fun and, just in case, more blogging tomorrow starting with an update on all things to do with mobile payments, with case studies from Commonwealth Bank (Kaching), PayPal, NTT DoCoMo and more.

 

 

Comments

[Rebecca Bond]

Am keen to find out what the best give-away is at SIBOS!

[Mary Kaplan]

SIBOX sounds like a cool conference. Hard to believe that the venue was not already equipped with wifi. And not to keep what Swift installed? Yikes! You're right that's pretty strange. Yes, what is the best give-away???