Hull Digital Live
// October 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Random Stuff
So this past week I went to Hull and East Yorkshire’s first digital and technology conference, Hull Digital Live. The line up was one that looked great on paper, with people from Sapient, The Guardian, TechCrunch, The BBC and GSK amongst others speaking on a variety of subjects - all in all Jon Moss did an absolutely fantastic job of getting them all together in one room, in Hull. No idea how much money he had to bribe some of them.
I sat dutifully through it until the end, hoping to suck up what I hoped would be knowledge which I could pass off as my own in the future - and for the most part failed. It wasn’t through lack of trying, there were very few of the speakers who I dismissed almost out of hand - and I was very interested in what everyone had to say, it’s just that what was said was either a) IMO wrong, b) plain bloody obvious, c) not applicable to me.
For the a’s and b’s were for my liking Rob “the bird” … who young as he seemed is one of the 30 most influential designers in the UK apparently. What he had to say fell into the a and b categories and he was one of the weaker choices of the day for speaker - one of his points being have a good design and don’t worry about how people find you - they’ll come through word of mouth. Yes that may be true when your “product” is design - and the people that are speaking about you are in design forums. It doesn’t translate well to “my products are mobile phones” where the final product is a million miles removed from what the design of the website is. But not to say too many a bad thing, his visuals and slideshow were truly great and powerpoint they were not.
For the b’s alone, well that has to go to the chap from the BBC who delivered the keynote for the event - which is to say that he walked us through the last 20 years of digital in the UK - complete with rehashings of BBC reports about how digital britain is not. All old news really. And delivered with the passion of a bean-sprout.
Finally, the not really applicable - that would be Jaan from Sweden who was frankly an awesome presenter and his talk had merit - if you were a freelancer or running your own small agency that could accommodate Noding. I work in an agency of 45 people, it’s not feasible.
There were of course absolutely great presentations too - Kai Gai from GSK was not only a brilliant speaker, but what he said made sense and I felt enlightened at the end of the talk about what people in pharma have to deal with when it comes to marketing. Mike from TechCrunch delivered a talk about startups which bordered on inspirational - and delivered it in a way that no one else on the day would dare try to mimic. Charles from The Guardian again delivered words of wisdom on getting yourself noticed by the press. These were all great talks!
The biggest let down of the day? Not the lunch no, it was the chap from Sapient who wowed us with his client list and then told us his 5 trends for the future - and I swear he pulled them all from Wired or .NET magazine - it’s fuckin’ sapient, wow me. And not using Augmented Reality demo’s please.
I actually had a very good day for the most part with the good talks more than making up for the bad ones, I just worry that when the event was being planned there was an inclination to go low-brow with some of the talkers rather than aim for the stars - also there was in my opinion way too much emphasis on Hull and Yorkshire - yes, it’s the regions first conference, but as the TechCrunch guy said - it’s the internet, no one cares if you’re in Hull. So deal with KC once and then let it go. It was a good day, and I’d give it a solid 7/10 - I don’t get to many of these conferences and it provided a certain amount of inspiration and knowledge, but next year I hope that the speakers get vetted a little more - really, don’t invite Yorkshire Forward back.
Oh, and did I mention Karen from AudioBoo … ?
