On 20-21 April, the second edition of the Net Futures conference was held in Brussels, this year under the title “Driving Growth in the #DigitalSingleMarket”. Keynote speakers were Vice-President & Commissioner for Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip, Commissioner for Digital Economy & Society Günther Oettinger, or Secretary for Information Technology Policy of Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation Manoel da Fonseca.
Net Futures is an annual event that brings together the communities working in research and innovation in the topics of networking, Cloud computing, Software & services, Internet of Things, Future Internet or Experimentation Infrastructures, among others. It is therefore an event of considerable importance to NESSI.
The conference programme included parallel tracks on three different fields: (1) development of standards and interoperability, (2) making the most of the data economy, and (3) democratising the Internet. The idea behind these tracks was to reflect the multidisciplinary of the topics and ensure that not only technical aspects are taking into consideration, but also societal aspects and the economic impacts of the European policies and their implementation. NESSI members can check on the event website the main contents of sessions focused on the initiative known as free flow of data, and the latest achievements of the Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership thanks to the session addressing the enhancement of entrepreneurship through R&I, where major startups supported by the FIWARE Open Platform had an opportunity to pitch, and where self-sustainable initiatives such as the FIWARE Open Source Community and the FIWARE Foundation were shared with the audience as important outcomes of this programme. Companies like Atos, Engineering and Orange, founding Partners of NESSI, are very involved in those initiatives.
In the keynote Speech at the Closing Plenary session of Net Futures 2016, Commissioner Günther Oettinger highlighted the main concepts behind the package recently announced by the European Commission on “Digitising European Industry”, as well as its links with Future Internet, main driver of this event. He pointed out specifically three links: a) Communication networks, b) Open service Platforms, and c) standardization in key areas like 5G, IoT and Cloud.