BrazilKPMG to host connected cities conference at Hong Kong start-up festival
Big Four professional services firm KPMG will host a smart cities conference as part of this week’s Startmeup Festival in Hong Kong.
While the world’s attention turns to Davos for another year – for some via KPMG’s interactive social media data visualisation platform WEFLIVE – the Asian branch of the Big Four firm will also be taking a part in another conference closer to home; the five-day StartmeupHK Festival in Hong Kong, which runs until the end of the week. Some 8,000 delegates are expected to attend throughout the course of the event.
Organised by the Hong Kong government’s foreign direct investment agency InvestHK, the StartmeupHK Festival for 2019 will focus on key themes in the healthtech, artificial intelligence, financial services, education, and lifestyle & retail technology spaces, along with featuring a full-day Connected Cites Conference on the 24th hosted by KPMG, with a number of the firm’s experts set to speak.
Held in partnership with Siemens and the Wilson Group together with local tech consultancy JOS and the Smart Cities Consortium, the KPMG speaking contingent for the Connected Cities Conference will include Julian Vella, APAC Head of Infrastructure, and Steve Lewis, Associate Director, Infrastructure Advisory of KPMG China, along with local advisory partners Alan Yau and Marcos Chow.
The agenda for the Connected Cities Conference meanwhile will cover areas such as the future of healthcare, work and buildings, an exploration of urban mobility, the Internet of Things in respect to sustainable cities, and the question of what the personality of a city is. KPMG will also present its survey findings of its connected cities report, and discuss sustainable cities from the perspective of planning, design, construction, and future generations.
Also set to speak, twenty-year KPMG veteran Anson Bailey, APAC Head of Consumer & Retail and Head of Technology for Hong Kong, who said on LinkedIn; “Really looking forward to #StartmeupHK Festival next week here in HK and proud that #KPMGChina is supporting the start-up community along with many more dedicated vertical champions. So lucky we have a great community here in HK and hope to see you at the HKCEC next week!”
In addition to the Connected Cities Conference, KPMG is also a platinum sponsor of the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund’s JUMPSTARTER event on 23rd and 24th, which seeks to connect high-quality tech start-ups with the corporate and investment community, while the firm will also host the ‘Future Digital Strategies at the Retail’s Cutting Edge’ forum and moderate a panel on the ‘Top 50 Innovative Retail Leaders in Hong Kong.’
The latter form part of the StartmeupHK Festival’s ‘Retail’s Cutting Edge’ segment hosted by retail-focused publisher Inside Retail on the 23rd, with OC&C Strategy Consultants’ noted regional expert Pascal Martin among the schedule of speakers, presenting on new retail trends and their implications in Hong Kong. The StartmeupHK festival will serve as a prelude to this year’s Rise event, the largest tech conference in Asia to be held in Hong Kong in early July, with KPMG together with Accenture among the event’s major sponsors.
