A two-day conference that aims to bring together leading technologists,
media innovators and venture capitalists to explore new ideas for the digital
space is coming to South Florida in December. Planned for the eve of Art Basel-Miami
Beach, SIME MIA also aims to mine the intersection
of technology and creativity.
Founded in 1996 in Sweden, SIME has held conferences in Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Helsinki, and the Miami event will be SIME’s first in the United States. Ola Ahlvarsson, chairman and founder of SIME and a part-time Miami Beach resident, said Miami is the ideal city to expand to because of its Latin American ties and international appeal. It doesn’t hurt that the city is a great place to be during Art Basel. But Ahlvarsson also said the startup activity building in Miami was also a factor. “I have always loved Miami, and now there is an undeniable bubbling of talent, curiosity and a thirst for knowledge that made this decision natural,” the Swedish serial entrepreneur and investor said.
About 500 leading global
entrepreneurs from
Europe, North America and Latin America have been invited to the Dec. 3-4 event,
which will include talks, presentations, workshops and demos on wide-ranging topics such as big data, venture capital, artificial intelligence, Google Glass, the digital transformation of
our cities and the rise of Miami as an emerging innovation and media hub, organizers announced on Monday. But a special element of SIME conferences,
Ahlvarsson said, is that this is not your typical, often boring conference format
-- SIME conferences are relevant, interactive, inspirational, surprising and fun.
Confirmed speakers for the conference, to be held at the New World Center and The LAB Miami, include Neil Jacobstein, co-chair of artificial intelligence and robotics at Singularity University in the NASA Research Park in Mountain View, Calif.; Martin Varsavsky, founder and CEO of FON and serial entrepreneur; Pablo Holman, hacker, futurist and inventor at Intellectual Ventures Laboratory; Shel Israel, writer and speaker on social media issues and co-author of the soon-to-be-released The Age of Context with Robert Scoble; Dave McClure, tech investor and founder of 500 Startups in Silicon Valley, and Tim Kring, screenwriter and television producer of Crossing Jordan, Heroes and Touch.
The event is a partnership between SIME, MIA Collective and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “SIME MIA will serve as a platform that will contribute knowledge, education and resources to inspire people to think bigger than ever,” said Demian Bellumio of the MIA Collective, a group of entrepreneurs and investors that plans events that explore media, art and technology.
Tickets for the general public go on sale Sept. 9, and will cost $699 until Oct. 15, $799 until Nov. 15 and $999 after that. For more information, visit www.simemia.co.