Attended a few good events recently; presented at the British Telecom apprentice managers event in Gatwick, Brokerbin’s UK partner meeting in Manchester and the ElementK Learning Practitioners seminar in St Paul’s. Some excellent new contacts through those, and enjoyed them all. By far, this was the best thing I heard: “The best things in life aren’t things.”
How we consume is changing very quickly. In our non-stop world, with barely time to think, let alone face-to-face interaction, there is an opportunity. Digital content is expected for free in the modern internet era, and yet there is a lot of cash in the consumer pocket up for grabs – how, by enhancing our personal convenience. Save us time, make difficult choices easy, give us what we want, when and where we want it, and fast – make our lives easy and you could reap some real rewards.
This is exactly what the web is all about. A producer from Uruguay who uploaded a short film to YouTube in November has been offered an £18.6m contract to make a Hollywood film. Fede Alvarez’s short film “Ataque de Panico” (Panic Attack) featured giant robots invading and destroying Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. It is 4 mins 48 seconds long and was made on a budget of £186, but has attracted more than 1.5 million views on YouTube. Within days he was contacted by Hollywood studios and is now planning the new movie – you see, it can happen.
Just back from the windy city, one of my favourite places, Chicago. Favourite not for its weather or the sightseeing, but the people – large portions of food, good attitude, great people. Enjoy reading US papers every day for snippets of news – learnt that 5 million tweets are now recorded daily and bloggers post 900,000 new articles every day. That is enough to fill a broadsheet for nearly 20 years! Also discovered TweetLater, which allows you to schedule tweets to post when you are offline. The wonder of information.
I hear Kellogg’s is using new technology to stamp out imitation cereals. They will be branding every corn flake with its logo. They make 67 million boxes annually, and the new technology will burn its signature onto every individual flake. The originals are always the best.
The web has become the biggest store in history and most things are free – 100% off. Consumers are saving money and playing free online games, listening to free music on ‘we7′, cancelling basic cable and watching free video on Hulu, killing their landlines in favour of Skype. How do we compete with free? How do we learn to embrace it?
I read that a lady in Korea has just passed her driving test at the 950th attempt. I passed first time, then smashed my dad’s car. Sometimes – often – it is better to fail and learn from the experience. What the current wave of technology does, is let us try things; try using Twitter, try a Facebook page, try putting video instructions onto YouTube, because we can learn as we go. It is better to take a leap and try stuff than spend hours discussing it! You can always correct course along the way.
When you work in sales and marketing, what a customer says about you is worth 10 times what you say about yourself. This testimonial came in from Dave Cruse, the founder of a great little company and supplier search engine called Conjungo, where technology buyers identify and shortlist suppliers. It is probably my proudest testimonial:
“There have been all sorts of Events, Summits and Conferences during 2009 yet none have bettered the CompTIA annual member conference held at Ascot Racecourse recently. The organisation from start to finish was superb and highly professional, the speakers gave an excellent added dimension with very topical content and your very own Matthew Poyiadgi was simply outstanding and well worth seeing. Finally, to listen to James Caan of the Dragons Den was inspiring to say the least. Congratulations on the best event of 2009.” David Cruse, CEO and Founder – Conjungo.com
+James+Caan.jpg)
After months of planning and organising, my team successfully delivered our annual CompTIA Member Conference at Ascot Racecourse. It was a resounding success and more than 250 people left very satisfied. James Caan was excellent and a talking point throughout the day, Steve Clayton from Microsoft’s International team gave a brilliant vision of the future to 2019, our US executive management were a fantastic support throughout the week and I shared my own mad-cap presentation on technologies, trends and people! I feel a bit deflated today, now that it is all over, but I am pleased with the results. Roll on the planning for next year, but first a weekend of rest.
Joined the CRN Conference this week, and met some interesting players in the IT channel. Intel had some very visionary things to share and for Dell the emphasis was on their partner programme. A good day, well organised and attended. Whittlebury is also a great venue, and as there was little signal for mobile phones, it meant we spent more time talking face to face with people. Refreshing. I focused my presentation on technologies, trends and people as the principle asset of organisations today. Great example of that was the headline guest, Sir Peter Rigby, founder and chairman of SCH. Humble, hardworking, private, but very successful man – my kind of person.
