Approximately 600 people gathered at the Westin Hotel in Waltham, MA, on May 28 to hear panel discussions and presentations on this year's theme, "Winning in the New Climate."

TIECON-East 2010, Co-Chaired by Abhishek Jain premiered new tracks and a very successful innovation showcase that provided a lot of value add to the attendees. The conference consisted of four tracks:  technology, life science, clean technology and this year's newest addition, entrepreneurial opportunities in India.

The opening session featured three leading entrepreneurs from India, Padmaja Reddy, Managing Director of Spandana, Sameer Manchanda, Chairman, DEN Networks, and Shantanu Prakash, Chairman and CEO of Educomp. All three had very optimistic outlook both on doing business in India and also working to uplift the under privileged. Reddy's Microfinance business is ready to go IPO and has made a large scale impact on the lives of poor women. Manchanda described the ease of doing business in the  New Media space due to lack of regulation. Shantanu Prakash emphasized the value of IT in providing quality education in places that lack infrastructure.

The technology track, broken into three panel discussions, presented an entrepreneur's view of the mobile market, "The Silver Lining in Cloud Computing" and "Media 2.0: The Digital Revolution".Panelists spoke about the breakthroughs in life science diagnostics, new technologies for preventative medicine and other related topics in a session titled "Hospital at Home: Transforming Health Care."

Clean technology fit into TiECON's definition of a "new climate" in a literal sense, as the United States continues to investigate alternatives to fossil fuels. TiECON's clean technology presentations looked at the future of clean energy sources, efficiency and storage, as well as energy management.

“The Mobile Decade" moderated by Wade Roush from Xconomy, featured: Nick Brachet, CTO of Boston’s Skyhook Wireless; Ramji Raghavan, Founder and CEO of Movik; and Brad Hoover from General Catalyst Partners, a Cambridge-based venture capital firm was extremely revealing about the future of mobile business.

“If you look at the introduction of the iPhone, it’s helped consumers realize their phone can be much more than a voice device. As a result of that, we’ve seen a rise in the adoption of mobile applications that might have been available before but now make more sense to consumers and encourage them to do things with their mobile devices they might not have thought of,” said Hoover, who’s an investor in MocoSpace, which is a social media platform for mobile devices developed here in Boston. It’s all about entertaining users, and Hoover seemed to see more room for mobile users to find all kinds of entertainment with their devices. The panelist seemed to feel that browser-based applications still have the greatest potential for scaling, because they can be deployed on nearly all of the platforms currently supported by new mobile devices and the current landscape of service providers.

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