Dreamhack Winter 2013 in the small city of Jonkoping in central Sweden claims to be the world’s largest digital event. I was skeptical at first, but when I arrived for the event, I was completely amazed at the scale of things in this tiny part of the world where its only bright for 5 or 6 hours during day this time of the year.
Of course, the amount of daylight didn’t impact one bit the large numbers of people streaming into the event venue well before opening time on Thursday afternoon.
DreamHack is focused on everything you can do with computers, Internet and digital entertainment and culture. Naturally that means there’s a lot of gaming, communication, programming, designing, music composing..pretty much whatever forms of digital you can imagine!
What struck me as most interesting was that most attendees only ranged between 15 and 25 years old, but were already making incredible use of technology and were really pushing the limits with their enormous needs for networking and connectivity. These are without a doubt the new generation of IT professionals and they will demand no limits.
Cisco provided the underlying infrastructure and connectivity along with our partner Telia. The scale was unbelievable, with a 40gb internet connection, and the capability to support 100M (yes ONE HUNDRED MILLION) online viewers from around the world.
Cisco’s Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution was installed at the event across all the halls, and we had a keynote presentation at the Dream Orange Arena on Friday afternoon.
This event in my opinion has been the greatest test of CMX to date with it had huge scale, spread over 4 or 5 big halls, lots and lots of connected devices (95% connected as opposed to probing). There is a real credit due to the local Swedish and North Territory teams who delivered a fantastic performance.
By late in the first day of the event 19000 devices were connected to the network, that was less than 7 hours after the event opened.
In one hall alone (and there were 4) over 5400 devices were connected at 10pm.
An interesting thing that is also evident is that most people once they entered the hall and found their spots generally remained there. On Thursday night there are very few repeat visits indicating that people remained in the hall for long periods at a time.
Dreakhack was certainly an eye-opening event for me – in a very good way and really confirms that the future of IT and connectivity is only going to get faster and faster!!! It’s especially exciting to be evangelizing Cisco’s Wi-Fi location based answer to the future of the always connected mobile user experience: CMX. For more information on CMX visit: www.cisco.com/go/cmx.
For more on our presence at Dreamhack: http://www.dreamhack.se/dhw13/2013/11/12/cisco-connected-mobile-experiences-cmx/
http://www.dreamhack.se/dhw13/
Are there any high-res versions of the images in this post?
Hi Zack
Email me if you want some
Brendan