It has been an amazing 6+ months of 2017. The year started in a hurry with our acceptance to the Urban-X Smart City Program in New York City which included equity investments from BMW MINI and SOSV. It was a great experience spending most of 2017 at the new MINI A/D/O Design Centre in Brooklyn where we collaborated with BMW industrial designers and SOSV software experts. However, we are quite excited to be back at our Ottawa HQ home located in the amazing Innovation Centre at Bayview Yards in Ottawa.
However, the biggest news of the first 5 months as we closed a $1.1M USD contract with Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in May. contextere will be developing and deploying an intelligent personal agent for aerospace maintainers on the C130J Super Hercules fleet.
Not ones to sit our on laurels we have been sharing our vision of a world where technological innovation and job creation are not seen as mutually exclusive. This includes at AR in Action (MIT Media Lab), Smart Cities NYC, Machine Learning in Oil & Gas (Houston), Wavefront IoT (Toronto), Defense and Infrastructure Roundtables (Washington, DC), and the McRock IIoT Symposium (Montreal).
We were also fortunate to generate earned media from our story including articles in Fast Company, Financial Post, Ottawa Business Journal and the Globe & Mail. Our specific focus on supporting ‘blue collar’ jobs where ‘warm hands touch cold steel’ is both unique and compelling. The best operational planning and predictive analytics in the world can’t realize their full potential if the person doing the job does not have the information and knowledge required to execute correctly.
The last few weeks were extremely busy with numerous trades shows across North America where contextere is speaking or demonstrating our latest prototypes. This includes Augmented World Expo in California and CANSEC in Ottawa. As we take an early peek into the Fall of 2017 the trade show season picks up steam again as we are already confirmed to be speaking at ‘Smart Industry 2017’ in Chicago and ‘Meeting of the Minds’ in Cleveland.
