Competition, investment and innovation

We have already started work on The 2017 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place next year from June 5-7 in Toronto. Our theme for 2017 will be: “Competition, Investment and Innovation: Driving Canada’s Digital Future” and we will also be recognizing 25 years of communications competition in Canada.

A colleague suggested that it might be interesting to highlight ways that innovations originating in the communications sector have made a positive impact on our daily lives. So I have been going through various archives to research some of the inventions that have come out of the labs of service providers and suppliers. Starting November 1, my Twitter feed will highlight one each day leading up to the conference, with a #CTS17 hashtag.

I will also collect them in Storify. As I was pulling together some of the innovations, I noticed that there were major anniversaries or milestones in the past few weeks, such as last week’s 60th anniversary of the first trans-Atlantic call over the TAT-1 submarine cable:

and the 20th anniversary of the release of RIM’s Inter@ctive Pager 900:

Today happens to be the 150th birthday of Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden, a pioneer of radio communications. So, the Storify board is already open and I will try to keep it updated as I post the daily innovations beginning November 1.

I welcome your suggestions on items to post over the next few months.

In addition, if you would like to get involved as a sponsor or speaker for The 2017 Canadian Telecom Summit, please reach out to me as well. Registrations for next year’s event will open November 1, when we launch the new website. In the meantime, please mark the dates in your calendar: June 5-7, 2017 in Toronto.

I look forward to seeing you there.