“I have always been a champion of IT as an enabler,” says Jannat Maqbool of Wintec.
“Throughout my career I have been involved in initiatives that, to quote one of my previous managers, have looked at solutions to get ‘machines to do what machines do best and humans to do what humans do best’.”
Thus, it was a lightbulb moment for her when she attended a Wintec research symposium early this year and one of the speakers was Alexandra Deschamps. Deschamps, director of Designswarm, has been organising IoT London Meetups for the past seven years.
“We caught up during her visit and discussed whether an IoT Meetup would be of interest to parties in the Waikato,” says Maqbool.
She then met with Mariana Van der Walt, centre director at the Centre for Innovation & Applied Research at Wintec, and within weeks of that meeting, they held the first IoT Waikato event.
“Wintec has brought Alex to New Zealand (and to Wintec specifically) for the past three years to help us remain relevant in the world of IoT – she is a global thought leader, and we have benefited from her input for a number of technology prototypes we have built in the world of precision farming, environmental monitoring and technology-enabled solutions for aging well, using IoT principles.”