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This is an open and free event. Please share this with anyone you think would be interested!
Come and be part of something significant in the NQ IT community: Register your free place now!
Registration puts you in the running for great prizes from:
Starting at 1pm on the Saturday following the conference, IT@JCU in Townsville will be hosting a 24-hr
programming sprint around the theme,
Smarter Townsville.
The event is open to all and you could have a lot of fun, learn heaps and win great prizes...
Learn more
and join in!
Joining us from Brisbane for the conference, Mark has extensive experience in digital business
development and consultancy, helping businesses make the most of digital technology. He is currently
advising a wide range of companies seeking high growth through digital marketing and innovation, as well
as growing his own interests in new companies and products. Some of these include:
freshOps,
2nd Base,
RocketBuy and
FunCaptcha.
Mark holds a Masters in Business Technology (UNSW) and a Bachelors Degree in Business majoring in
Marketing (QUT).
He has worked for a range of companies including FOX Sports, News Corp (Australia), Brisbane
Marketing and Nielsen Netratings. He is also active in the industry via
AIMIA, chairing the education pillar for QLD.
Jane's experience covers the breadth of large multi-national companies, start-ups and tertiary education, where she has sought to balance creativity and innovation to achieve results-based outcomes. She trained as a Computer Engineer and was nationally recognised as one of Canada’s future leaders before coming to JCU last year. Jane is passionate about implementing an agile environment in a corporate structure.
Who's passionate about sustainability, technology, and Open Source? David's currently incubating his own startup ideas, whilst working on a range of projects from home efficiency monitoring, web applications & security, and server provisioning. In his spare time, David works for the JCU eResearch Centre, managing a wide selection of services for researchers, including the JCU Research Portfolio and eSpaces.
Aden is passionate about startups, business and the impact Open Source can have within the business
world. Aden is a director of Comit, which is currently launching its new platform. He works a lot with
Ember.js and Node.js as well as providing consultancy work to local businesses.
Aden will be discussing his most recent startup,
comitplatforms.com and how his team have pivoted from their fitness-oriented platform to one
aimed at all types of businesses.
Nicky is a friendly and approachable geek from Cairns, where she owns and manages Far North Queensland’s largest Web development and hosting firm, Precedence. Nicky has worked in the website development industry since 1996, helping hundreds of businesses to profit from their websites through ethical marketing practices and well‐planned website architecture. She has been fortunate enough to hold workshops in conjunction with Facebook, the Queensland State Government, the Cairns Business Women’s Club, Gulf Savannah Development and Mareeba Chamber of Commerce.
Head of Platform Development Tom has over 11 years' experience with the Web, having worked for local and state governments and the private sector around North Queensland. After many years of building and improving Web applications with the Microsoft stack, Tom moved in to management, overseeing the direction and implementation of various systems and projects within local government. More recently, he has had the opportunity to work at SafetyCulture, building the next generation of safety management systems and experiencing the roller coaster that is a startup. Tom finds the challenges of managing computing and people together to be exciting and rewarding.
Tristan is an ardent believer in the power of spreading knowledge and experience amongst the development community. After working in Web development for several years, Tristan joined SafetyCulture in 2012 as one of the company's first engineers. Working from a garage, he built their first generation cloud platform and now forms part of SafetyCulture's global platform engineering team. Tristan has worked on several open source projects, has been a core contributor to local development organisations and conferences and most notably has his face on a line of clothing and homewares.
Julie has worked at JCU in central IT for 25 years, and prior to that was a programmer and process developer with the federal government. She has a business background majoring in computing.
Dylan is a born and bred Townsvillian. His interest in conservation of animal species morphed into sustainability during his involvement in his high school's solar programme. As a grade 10 student, Dylan wrote and presented the Youth Declaration to the International Oceans Institute (IOI) conference. Throughout his final year in high school Dylan wrote the QLD Student Blueprint for Environmental Sustainability to then Premier Peter Beattie and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Earth Dialogues conference. Dylan gained employment with Integrated Sustainability Services at Townsville City Council. During this time he travelled to Malta to address the IOI on sustainable fisheries management in the Pacific and to lead the youth parliament portion of the conference. Dylan’s work involves looking at the connections between people and their environment and how technology can play a part in this space.
Unfortunately, some of our previously-advertised presenters including Lawrence Crumpton and Richard
Sazima will be unable to make it this year.
This actually allows us to host panel discussions in each session.
There will be three sessions with breaks to provide opportunities for networking and pleasantly refreshing good times together.
| Time | Presenter | Title - Details |
|---|---|---|
| 3:00 | Senator Glenn Lazarus | Conference opening, including the government's support for infrastructure, NBN, creation of incubators and industry hubs to support innovation and entrepreneurship, and growing new opportunities for the region. |
| 3:15 | Aden Tranter (Comit) | When I realised a startup wasn't just a domain name and an Apache instance - Aden discusses his perspective on startups and what it's like to be running one. |
| 3:25 | Mark Jones (Your Digital Solution) | Your digital strategy is not about you - Ensuring that the brilliant product you are building today is not too brilliant for your customers tomorrow. |
| 3:45 | Luke Bermingham & Andrew Joy | Founding a startup - Recent startup founders talk about Startup Catalyst, what they learned from Silicon Valley, and their experiences launching their own startup. |
| 3:50 | Panel Discussion | Mark, Aden, and others will answer questions about startups and tech businesses. |
| Time | Presenter | Title - Details |
|---|---|---|
| 4:30 | Angus Thomsen (IT@JCU) | Prototyping live graphics with SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) tools, including a demo of quickly manipulating any SVG in the browser with code. |
| 4:35 | Tom Dance & Tristan Davey (SafetyCulture) | Lessons learned from a large scale data migration and deployment - SafetyCulture migrated from Google App Engine to Amazon Web Services and completely re-architected their Web back end along the way. This is what we learned. |
| 4:50 | Dylan Furnell (Townsville City Council) | Townsville Smart City Solar City - How Townsville is transforming the view of smarter cities to help us address the challenges of information overload, technology complexity, the rising costs of infrastructure, sustainability and citizen engagement. |
| 5:05 | Special Feature | Essential Skills for the Information Age |
| 5:10 | Panel Discussion | Angus, Tom, Tristan & Dylan will answer questions about technology and innovation. |
| Time | Presenter | Title - Details |
|---|---|---|
| 6:00 | Jane Polak Scowcroft (Web & Social Media, JCU) | Put the Me in Mentoring (... or is that like WAY too cheesy?) - The value of mentoring at any stage of your career, with a particular focus on how to find and cultivate a strong mentoring relationship. |
| 6:15 | David Beitey (eResearch, JCU) | Unsearchable != unsolvable: being a rockstar problem solver in IT - Learn how solving never-before-seen problems helps you as an IT professional, & discover why you should rethink asking for help. |
| 6:25 | Nicky Jurd (Precedence) | Personal branding for IT professionals - Break free of the archaic geek stereotype and learn how to present yourself to employers as a useful, credible and smart team player. |
| 6:40 | Julie Land (ICT, JCU) | Humans need not apply - Considering CEDA's recent report, Australia's future workforce? and what jobs and skills we need to develop in Australia. |
| 6:50 | Prize draws (you must be registered and present to win), discussion and conference wrap-up, take left-over food home and turn off the lights... |
During the breaks in Townsville, check out great exhibits from:
Would you like to show off your IT business at the conference? Email now.
Tweet to @itatjcu
Use the Twitter hashtag
#nqitcon to tweet comments or questions
during/before/after the event.
Please direct any enquiries to the MC:
Lindsay Ward (James Cook University)
lindsay.ward@jcu.edu.au
07 4781 4619