033: Nicole Denil (Internet of Things at Microsoft)

Nicole Denil on Innovation City

“It seems like it’s in the future… but the future is here, the future is now. It’s actually happening. It’s happening in pockets.” — Nicole Denil

Welcome to Innovation City—powered by Venture Cafe—where Tyler Kelley and Michael Johnson, Co-Founders of SLAM! Agency, interview innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in conjunction with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community.

Today’s guest is Nicole Denil, GM of Global Channel Sales for Internet of Things at Microsoft. Nicole has extensive experience in both corporate and startup environments, working in marketing, sales, product development and partner development in the fields of cloud computing and IOT. Prior to her time at Microsoft, Nicole worked for Rockwell Automation and Rockwell Software, in addition to working at (and founding) several startups and businesses of her own. Nicole sits down with our team to talk about developing cutting-edge technologies, the power of tech to make the world a better place — and she also shares some insider examples of next-generation technologies that her team is working on right now. You can find Nicole on Twitter at @NicoleDenil.

They discuss:

• Why Microsoft hired Nicole; her extensive experience working on the bleeding edge of tech
• Her focus: exploring and launching cutting edge tech to see what sticks
• Visiting Venezuela as an exchange student
• The importance of ethical business
• Making the world a better place through technology
• Her time at Rockwell Automation
• Moving to Microsoft
• Building technologies that can support nonprofits
• Supporting disability/accessibility tech
• Providing tech to support communities during moments of crisis and disaster response
• The experience of living surrounded by extreme poverty in Venezuela
• Teacher strikes and education in Venezuela
• How her experience in Venezuela inspired her career in tech
• How to connect working for a tech company with doing good
• The celebrity status of working for a large multinational corporation
• Benefits of IOT tech vs. hackability of smart devices
• Examples of augmented reality benefits in emergency situations
• Adapting technology designed for a paralyzed Indy 500 driver to race again (he did!) to first responder applications that monitor the data concerning physical distress
• Super-aggregated data that quantum computing can play a role in
• ‘Massifying’ pockets of success to create breakthroughs
• Crowdsourcing medical technicians in Canada to speed up the diagnosis process
• In-home blood analysis
• The Internet of Things as an evolution of cloud computing
• How tech can augment, not replace, human decisions
• Promising fields of application: the Medical field, and Industrial Automation
• Predictive maintenance; knowing when machines will fail can save tremendous amounts of money and resources
• Having appliances signal repair technicians on their own before they fail
• The goal; eliminating any kind of waste or inefficiency
• The disruptive power of automation
• How automation democratizes IT