Our 2021 conference schedule: another year filled with an esoteric collection of events

5 January 2021 (Saint-Malo, France) – This is normally the busiest part of the year for us as far as tech conferences because our schedule is front-loaded with pretty much back-to-back events over an 8-to-10 week period.

But this year COVID has taken a toll, and I have semi-retired to relax a bit more, handing off the heavy lifting to the “kids” so they can begin a slow take-over of my operations as I slumber into the sunset. So I have reduced my activity.

The following is our usual conference schedule and quite a few have been cancelled or gone virtual but it gives you an idea of the breadth of our coverage:

• the CyberSecurity Forum in Lille, France

• the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany

• Barcelona Spain for the mobile technology granddaddy, the Mobile World Congress

Then later in the year my two favorites:

• the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy

• Cannes Lions (which is for the advertising and media industry but where I have learned the most about the impact of technology, the visualization of data, creativity, and how to create a high level of quality storytelling)

Then pretty much reading and writing and my film work. I finish the year at:

• the DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival (no web site)

• the Frankfurt Book Fair

My media team is busy on their own.  They cover:

• CES in Las Vegas, Nevada

• the Digital Investigations Conference in Zurich, Switzerland

• BlackHat / DEFCON in Las Vegas, Nevada

• Georgetown Law Cybersecurity Law Institute in Washington, D.C.

• RSA Cyber Security Conference in San Francisco, California

Sandwiched in throughout the year we all manage several machine learning workshops and several Google workshops, and the excellent corporate counsel events run by the IQPC Corporate Counsel Exchange which has events in Amsterdam, London and Munich.

Yes, I am an opsimath at heart but I think everything in technology is related and that schedule provides us perspective and a holistic tech education. Call it my personal “Theory of Everything”.

Invariably one can expect a major tech story (or two or three) to drop in from the sky which causes your schedule to go askew. But as usual: these conferences always seems to have some brilliant sources for analyzing the story-of-the-day, no matter what it is.