Friday, May 21, 2010

CATA 25th Annual Innovation Award Gala - Proud to Be Canadian Night

The CATA Alliance Annual Innovation Awards Gala held in Ottawa on May 19th 2010 hosted by Paul Brent, Host of CJOH TV's TECH NOW, and John Reid, President of the CATA Alliance was a world-class event and evening celebration.

Over 500 executives from business, government and academia attended the evening. 20 awards were recognized at the GALA with sponsorship from leading organizations.

Recognitions ranged from HR Leadership Aware, CIO Leadership Award, Outstanding Clean Tech Product Innovation, Outstanding Content and Application in the Mobility Industry to the prestigious Sara Kirk Award for Women Entrepreneurs.

The winners are posted on the CATA wesbite

This is the sixth year I have attended the CATA Innovation GALA ball, and each year we have a chance as a community to applaud the strengths of our entrepreneurs in Canada and reflect despite some of our challenges in this country - we continue to have tremendous success stories of entrepreneurial, business, government and academic champions who make a difference every day to the fabric of this country.

I want to personally recognize John Reid and his leadership team, and support staff as without leadership from talent like them... events like this are not made possible. Thank you to the CATA Team!

The finale of the evening was the CATA announcement of i-CANADA a program vision to strengthen the broadband infrastucture in Canada. What was made clear by the eloquent speech delivered by Bill Hutchison at the closure of this evening is we have a great deal more work to do in this area. When you hear Canada is rated in out of 30 countries ranking 22 in terms of our broadband and high bandwidth infrastructure in terms of intelligent community rankings... it tells us we have to all come together and make a difference not just for our current generation but also to plan for our future generation needs.

Bill outlined a compelling vision, one that I hope others will learn more about.

Knowing one day my grandchildren can talk to a nurse in our home on our television set, and my mother in law can check her sugar levels easily for her diabetes using intelligent smart systems in our home, and my fridge can relay to the super market we are low on milk, bread, and eggs, and my house is environmentally controlled by my personal computer at the office ... these types of smart intelligent services will not come our way unless we address our broadband infrastructure.

Bill was behind the success of Canarie which enabled educational institutions across Canada to be connected and use high speed infrastructure. We now need to catch up in our business to business, and business to community infrastructure.

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