About Consensus

Consensus is a yearly blockchain event by Coindesk. This time it was organised in Hilton Midtown, Manhattan. More attendees than ever, about 8 000, arrived New York City for 14–16th of May 2018 to make new connections and to follow the latest news of the crypto world.

We arrived a bit early to join a Sunday brunch with Streamr and other partners.

The event was full of crypto enthusiasts and companies showcasing their blockchain related projects. So crowded but still a fun event.

We had a booth in Streamr’s private pavilion which was furnished by professionals to look good and feel cozy. A great booth location to talk with visitors about our tech. Ruuvi was one of the few hardware companies in the whole event.

Ruuvi & Streamr live demo

To stand out at the event, we prepared a sensor data live demo.

With Streamr’s team we deployed multiple gateways around the venue which were set to listen nearby RuuviTags moving around.

Then we had an info display showing in real-time how many RuuviTags the gateways did hear. Location and sensor data produced by the units were also collected and stored to Streamr’s backend.

To make the demo work, we handed free RuuviTags to our booth visitors. During the 3-day event we gave more than 400 RuuviTag units to keep. The devices were already on and visitors started to produce sensor and location data right away.

From left to right: Henri, Otso and I.

Chatting with a booth visitor.

We had a crowd!

Otso showcasing the Ruuvi Station mobile app.

A video tour to Streamr’s pavilion.

The whole gang.

More photos

Streamr’s Henri checking what the robots were up to.

Visa Vallivaara from VTT demonstrating their ultra-wideband (UWB) asset tracking box which was linked to Streamr.

Martti Ylikoski and Santeri Heikkilä from Nokia showcased their Kuha mobile network.

Streamr Marketplace in action.

Free candy!

Panel discussion at the Consensus main stage.

Media guests filming Ruuvi’s booth!

Nano meetup

After the 3-day Consensus event, we went to visit Nano meetup that happened in a restaurant close by.

Nano (previously RaiBlocks) is one of the projects we’ve been closely following for a while now. Nano’s Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) protocol offers a good scalability and fast transactions with no fees.

It was nice to meet the team and chat with the founder Colin LeMahieu. And thanks for the drinks, guys!

Colin and Ruuvi team.

Nano is a global currency.

NYC Resistor

A day after, we decided to check out a local hackerspace. NYC Resistor seemed the most appropriate one so went there to meet the guys and left a bunch of RuuviTags behind for them to play with.

Conclusion

Our little trip to New York was a success in many ways. We met dozens of new tech people, made new friends, got offered some investment money and much more.

Henri Pihkala, Shiv Malik and all the others, once again, thanks a lot for the invite! Let’s continue building more awesome things together.