Sheffield IoT Meetup: celebrating our 10th event

Pitch-In was delighted to support the tenth Sheffield IoT Meetup ‘IoT start-up to scale-up’ earlier this month. It marks a milestone in the successful series initiated back in October 2019.

The meetup was established in partnership with Sheffield-based cybersecurity firm Ioetec to create a thriving community around Internet of Things (IoT) and enable knowledge sharing and collaboration. The main drivers were to enable real-world application of IoT technology and position Sheffield City Region (SCR) as a leading IoT centre.

Mark Davies, Co-founder and Director, Ioetec said at the time:

“We’re trying to build a new network, an ecosystem of people and organisations across the SCR with an interest in IoT, who might not normally connect. We want a broad range of interests across the IoT arena to facilitate discussions and forge potential collaborations.”

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the April meetup was planned to go ahead in person as normal. Being a technology themed event, the organising team wanted to lead the way and quickly transitioned to an online delivery. Since then we have now run more events virtually and are excited to be attracting an international audience!

On 2 March 2021, for ‘IoT start-up to scale-up’, we welcomed our keynote, IoT strategist Dimitrios Spiliopoulos from Amazon Web Services (AWS), technology businesses leaders to describe their IoT start-up to scale-up journeys, and featured local news about IoT Tribe and from the University of Sheffield.

Dimitrios Spiliopoulos, Senior IoT Go-To-Market Manager, EMEA, AWS talked about his role in supporting the IoT ecosystem in the UK and globally. He seeks to identify new business opportunities and solve problems by leveraging the power of IoT and data.

We then heard from four IoT start-up companies which are at various stages of scaling their businesses – with the first three being alumni of the technology accelerator IoT Tribe, based at Barnsley Digital Media Centre.

Mark Davies, Ioetec – Mark outlined Ioetec’s progress in securing unencrypted data for the large number of resource-constrained IoT devices (small devices where security is hard to implement) which have limited processing power, memory and battery life, to provide a secure end-to-end service where the data can be authenticated.

Aleksandra Sekowska, Chief Operating Officer, Proxigroup – Alex described Proxigroup’s drive to synchronise data communications between assets, allowing faster and more efficient decision-making based on real-time data. This has quickly led to them gaining clients in logistics, retail, the public sector and in the NHS.

Mauro Arruda, Chief Executive Officer, Smartia – Smartia leverages the power of data and artificial intelligence for increased productivity. Through skills in data science, software development and automation they are developing an industrial intelligence platform, Maio, to collect and present data from assets that can provide commercial insights.

Furqan Alamgir, CEO and Co-founder, Connexin – Furqan shared his story of going from working as a surgeon in the NHS, with little to no business experience, to building Connexin and becoming an IoT and smart city leader in the UK. To date, Connexin has raised over £100 million and is building fibre and LoRaWAN networks nationally.

To round off the event talks, Steve Jubb and Oktay Cetinkaya from the University of Sheffield provided an update on the Pitch-In-supported ANTENNAS Project: ‘Radio frequency systems performance in smart cities: Automated NeTwork EvaluatioN iN urbAn Settings’). Focussed on increasing knowledge around the performance of wireless networks in urban environments, the project team has carried out their own mapping to achieve a highly granular understanding of local network coverage.

For anyone interested in participating in the IoT community, please join the Sheffield IoT meetup group, where any news and updates are posted. We look forward to connecting with you!