I am spending a few days at VivaTech, my current employer Rockfish Data won a challenge organized by Orange and the kindly hosted us at their booth.
We are not the only one, to me it looks like this conferences targets innovation departements and if you didn’t work at a company big enough like myself you probably didn’t even know what it is.
Innovative solutions by definitions needs to be discovered, it is something that you don’t know or have yet, so there are experts and teams who are dedicated to find innovative solutions for business needs. Where do you find this solutions? At VivaTech, sometime.
Who innovates? Sometime the departement itself develops those skills, venture capital is another way to contribute to innovative solution, or buying from startup. Orange and many companies here do all of those things and here they show case their innovative solution and their collaborations with startups.
This is why you will see small booths hosted by giants like AWS, MicroSoft or even nations like Italy, Armenia, Germany, China they are all here with the startup they decided to collaborate with.
For a startup it is a great opportunity to be presents by those giants like interesting solutions. Team members of the innovation team will bring to you decision makers internal the company as potential customer, or their customer directly. I had the opportunity to speak with a few members of the EU data team, I need say they went straight to what they were looking for.
If you have a walk here you will see AI everywhere. It is by far the most common words is all the advertising. Every company placed AI near its name. Slack AI, AWS Generative AI, Salesforce AI assistance and you name it. I didn’t spot yet the iTerm2 AI booth yet but I bet it is here somewhere.
But I am looking for more. There are innovative solutions for smart cities, things you see on YouTube only, a lot of robots of any kind. The one serving foods, arms assembling complicated things and so on.
What I like the most is the vibe built around innovation. Italy, my own country has a booth where it hosts a lot of small startups that I never hear about, a lot are doing sustainability and green economy. I am glad to know that even if compared with other countries we are not that risk prone and our investments are far away from what other countries do it looks like we care about our planed. I take it as a good sign.
I know people reading my blog are technical, VivaTech is not KubeCon, people stop at my booth to ask about value proposition, market feet, not about eBPF or syscall but I find this space interesting, please if you are here come to say hi and tell me about something extremely nerd. Do you need ideas? NixOS, containerd, eBPF!
