Nvidia cancels MWC 2020 plans, despite sponsoring the event

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What just happened? Nvidia has decided not to send any employees to Mobile World Congress this year, citing concerns about the dangers of international travel during the coronavirus outbreak. While they’re not the first company to cancel their travel plans, as a major MWC partner they’re sacrificing more than most.

“Given public health risks around the coronavirus, ensuring the safety of out colleagues, partners and customers is out highest concern. We’ve been looking forward to sharing our work in AI, 5G and vRAN with the industry. We regret not attending, but believe this is the right decision.”

Nvidia isn’t known for their mobile products exactly, but they’ve got a vested interest in the GPU-powered AI that enables mobile speech recognition, camera optimizations, and more. Even when these services are provided on-device, the neural network training and designing is still done on servers with recognizable Nvidia hardware.

Nvidia has ten sessions and roundtables focusing on AI planned for this year's MWC. They've also designed some sort of AI Edge Innovation Center revolving around AI, 5G and edge computing. Nvidia hasn’t clarified if these events are still going ahead, but without Nvidia employees present the events won’t benefit the company much regardless.

Most of MWC’s attendees haven’t expressed much concern about the coronavirus, with Qualcomm, Lenovo, Motorola, Xiaomi, Vivo and Honor reaffirming their plans to attend the event, according to The Verge.

ZTE cancelled their attendance, then changed their minds. LG and Ericsson are the two major withdrawals, apart from Nvidia.

The Mobile World Congress will begin on February 24 in Barcelona, and will bear witness to announcements and demonstrations of a variety of new flagship smartphones and 5G devices.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/83934-nvidia-cancels-mwc-2020-plans-despite-sponsoring-event.html

 
Has there even been one confirmed case of Corona Virus in all of Spain? What do they think they know that the general public doesn’t?
 
Political bantz and especially going at other users, should be a warning and then a ban. Techspot is no place for that bs.
 
The location of the conference is irrelevant, it the locations the attendees will be coming from that drive the risk, along with the properties of the virus itself (still unknown) and the willingness of the american legal system and/or jury to hold Nvidia liable for participating should any of their employees get sick.

Then there's also whatever their PR experts have advised them regarding how their intended positive messages might get buried or intertwined with potentially negative coverage of the wisdom of unnecessarily drawing international crowds together at this time.
 
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brucek said:
The location of the conference is irrelevant, it the locations the attendees will be coming from that drive the risk, along with the properties of the virus itself (still unknown) and the willingness of the american legal system and/or jury to hold Nvidia liable for participating should any of their employees get sick.

Then there's also whatever their PR experts have advised them regarding how their intended positive messages might get buried or intertwined with potentially negative coverage of the wisdom of unnecessarily drawing international crowds together at this time.
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China has already quarantined those in the "infected" area - no one will be travelling from there to this conference. Yes, there will be people from China attending - but China is a HUGE country.... This stems from ignorance, stupidity... and probably a bit of racism...
 
Well we're all certainly ignorant about many details of the new coronavirus, because they are currently unknown.

Whether it is stupid to potentially act out of an abundance of caution I guess comes down to your relative priorities of the value this conference provides vs. the value of potentially limiting its spread. I don't work in this industry but I tend to regard any conference as optional vs. critical. We have other ways of distributing information these days.

As to it being racist, I know plenty of people who factor in the possibility of either receiving or spreading even much more minor germs to events within their own family or neighborhood when making plans. I don't think this is a concern that only triggers when other countries are involved.
 
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Squid Surprise said:
China has already quarantined those in the "infected" area - no one will be travelling from there to this conference. Yes, there will be people from China attending - but China is a HUGE country.... This stems from ignorance, stupidity... and probably a bit of racism...
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Show me where the racism comes into this announcement; you cant, much like how toronto officials coundnt point to a single instance of "racism influenced hate crime" that they claimed was prevalent from their citizens in response to coronavirus; It's a red herring argument. China is a HUGE country, and for the virus to spread as far as it has in china the infected numbers would have to be in the hundreds of thousands, as in over 400K at this point, not 30k. You dont lock down 400 million people across over 15 cities because 30K are sick, more then that get sick with the normal flu every year. We know China lies, all the time, so why would they suddenly be telling the truth now? Having a massive convention with primarily people from a country ravaged by coronavirus mingling with people who have not been exposed to it is a TERRIBLE idea, hence why companies are pulling out, to prevent the virus from becoming a pandemic.

Quit trying to throw the RACISM card into everything involving a country where white people are not the majority. It's quite racist of you to assume everything has to do with race, and that people constantly make their decisions around what skin color some people have.
 
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Theinsanegamer said:
Show me where the racism comes into this announcement; you cant, much like how toronto officials coundnt point to a single instance of "racism influenced hate crime" that they claimed was prevalent from their citizens in response to coronavirus; It's a red herring argument. China is a HUGE country, and for the virus to spread as far as it has in china the infected numbers would have to be in the hundreds of thousands, as in over 400K at this point, not 30k. You dont lock down 400 million people across over 15 cities because 30K are sick, more then that get sick with the normal flu every year. We know China lies, all the time, so why would they suddenly be telling the truth now? Having a massive convention with primarily people from a country ravaged by coronavirus mingling with people who have not been exposed to it is a TERRIBLE idea, hence why companies are pulling out, to prevent the virus from becoming a pandemic.

Quit trying to throw the RACISM card into everything involving a country where white people are not the majority. It's quite racist of you to assume everything has to do with race, and that people constantly make their decisions around what skin color some people have.
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“We all know China lies”.... yes... we do.... but can you please supply me one piece of EVIDENCE that a conference in Spain is dangerous because there might be Chinese people attending?

There’s also those people who assume that since “Asian Companies” will be there, they will have Corona.... Asia has lots of countries.... with billions of people....More than 99.9% of whom don’t have Corona....
 
cliffordcooley said:
Those risks are why quarantines are hard to maintain. I'm sure there are many who died thinking the very same thing.
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Yes.... but less than a thousand people have died... there are BILLIONS of Asians... and the conference is in Spain... if I worked for a company that was going, I wouldn’t even think twice about it.
 
The topic here though is minimizing the risk. We all know or at least I hope we know that Spain is not the only location involved in traveling. There are many places and people traveling at each location. You never know when you may come in contact with a carrier. Airport are a hub between all airports around the world.
 
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cliffordcooley said:
The topic here though is minimizing the risk. We all know or at least I hope we know that Spain is not the only location involved in traveling. There are many places and people traveling at each location. You never know when you may come in contact with a carrier. Airport are a hub between all airports around the world.
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Yes... but that goes for ANY large event, ANYWHERE.... Heck, how come no one said anything during the Super Bowl?!? There were thousands of people there from all over the world... did anyone catch Corona from it?

Mass panic can be far more harmful than the actual disease... we don't even know how dangerous Corona can be... for all we know, your chances of dying from it could be minuscule even if you contract the virus!

As for this conference - these people will be just as "exposed" to Corona at their respective international airports as at the convention itself.
 
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Evernessince said:
Even if the virus turns out to not be that bad, it's better to play it safe and not aid it's spread. After all, you loose nothing by waiting.
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Well actually you do... you lose any of the benefits of this convention... which they obviously spent a lot on...
 
Squid Surprise said:
“We all know China lies”.... yes... we do.... but can you please supply me one piece of EVIDENCE that a conference in Spain is dangerous because there might be Chinese people attending?

There’s also those people who assume that since “Asian Companies” will be there, they will have Corona.... Asia has lots of countries.... with billions of people....More than 99.9% of whom don’t have Corona....
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are you thick? there has already been recorded cases in spain, uk and france. it has a 2 week incubation period where you can have it without knowing and spread it to other people before showing signs of the virus. the only sensible thing to do is hold off on any large gathering of people for the next few weeks until we get a real idea of the numbers involved.
 
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Squid Surprise said:
Yes.... but less than a thousand people have died... there are BILLIONS of Asians... and the conference is in Spain... if I worked for a company that was going, I wouldn’t even think twice about it.
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Officially less than a thousand have died and officially mostly old and already sick people. Did the doctor who first alerted to the virus and died look old and weakened to you?
 
ensuring the safety of out colleagues, partners and customers is out highest concern
Click to expand...

Letter 'r' is to the left from 't' on the keyboard. Please do make an effort next time! The same mistake twice in a single sentence is a bad writing pattern.
 
Anyone here contracted dengue virus before ? the fatality rate for dengue is 2.5% yet if let untreated the fatality rate is 20-50%. I caught dengue when I was 20 and had to stay in the hospital for 10 days. The symptoms seem worse for Corona virus though, and passing from human to human is even worse.
 
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