Get ready, Silicon Valley, for a really big show. It’s coming in early May to the Santa Clara Convention Center when organizers from UK-based Informa are combining not one or two, but four different tech conferences, rolling them up into a big digital ball, and pitching the whole thing over 100,000 square feet to more than 10,000 attendees. The conferences, which overlap between May 10 and 12, include the well-known annual Apps World North America, which previously had been held in San Francisco. There’s also the first-ever Future Connected Cars meeting and the Wearable World Congress, both sure to please latest-trend tech fans.
While the exhibition floor is free to the public, many of the events in each conference require various admission fees, some of which run into several thousands of dollars. Perhaps the most talked-about piece of the show is the annual Internet of Things World, also held in the past in San Francisco and now making its debut in Silicon Valley. That event will bring together innovators and experts from the entire connected ecosystem under one roof. The big event, says conference founder Gavin Whitechurch, comes as an estimated 6.4 billion connected things will be used this year, up 30 percent from 2015. That includes everything from automobiles and medical devices to toasters and doorbells.
Whitechurch said the IoT conference, now in its third year, has grown rapidly in popularity and that the event in May will be the highest-attended of all of our shows. We expect to exceed 10,000 attendees, considering how our first IoT conference drew 700 people and the second drew 5,800. In a release announcing the IoT conference, Whitechurch talked about the timing of the show here in the heart of IoT-obsessed Silicon Valley: The Internet of Things is made up of transformative technology — touching nearly every industry in today’s world. We started Internet of Things World to help companies navigate the evolving IoT landscape, and the event has matched the market’s explosive growth.
