Latest News
eHampshire 2008 Conference – The Report.
Posted: Wednesday 21st May 2008
The Holy Grail for the business community is Teleworking. E-working. Remote working. Call it what you will – but the operative word here is ‘working’. And they all want it to work – for the 21st century office to be as much a part of the home as the place you spend eight hours a day at. Press a button and – POW! – you’re able to do work half way around the world as easily as you could if you were standing there by the photocopier. On a certain level it’s a kind of wish fulfilment. Work will never end except when you want it to. The business fun need never stop! Imagine!
And there was quite a lot of imagining at the 2008-eHampshire conference. The theme this year was, of course, remote working. But it was more a case of gathering together to discuss how might it be done than how it will actually turn out.
The first impression I had as I walked in was the shock of having to wear a badge with my name on it. Wearing a badge! It was a bit like The Prisoner, especially given the odd design of the Guildhall: part Church and part Gothic revival. It would be very much at home in the Village and would fit in with the odd sense of disjointed unease. I just dropped mine in the bag they gave me and walked in incommunicado. A little mystery makes them more likely to talk to me, after all, even if it was just to ask me who I was.
Oh, and there was free coffee and biscuits. Yay!
I seemed to also have been given special attention by a very enthusiastic stewardess who guided me to the biscuits (very important) and then the main conference hall (almost as important), which was nice. I then walked up to a table with one or two familiar faces and then prepared for the first half.
Unsurprisingly, it was eHampshire chairman David Livermore who was – well – chairing the event. Not that anyone seemed to be paying attention at that point.
“Ladies and Gentlemen!” he called over the din. Then he started jabbing his mic with his finger. Thumpthumpthump. That shut them up.
“I feel like an air hostess!” he quipped, no doubt tempted to show us how the life jackets and face masks worked. But there were weightier matters. He began his introduction. Ten years ago, the Internet was for geeks. Now everyone uses it. (Ergo, we’re all geeks now, but no one really wants to admit this.) Cue a progression of dazzling stats showing the Web conquering all in its path like some sort of obese World-Of-Warcraft playing horde of Mongols.
The conclusion: big changes will happen and will continue to happen. “We’re in a revolution more impactful than the Industrial Revolution” he notes. Which may or may not be the case. 2018 will no doubt have the answers. And apparently Hampshire and the UK are in a good position to exploit this surge.
Cue the speakers, of which three were particularly interesting. (By the way, if you want to see all the presentations, go HERE!) The first of these was also the first to speak – Houston Spencer, Vice President, Business Strategy & Marketing of Alcatel-Lucent. He was a vivid man in a charcoal suit, pink shirt, green tie and a polished baritone voice that only he and his fellow Americans seem able to pull off. As the opening act, so to speak, he had to grip them from the start. And so his strategy to keeping it lively and interesting was to poke fun at himself while making salient points. It worked rather well, though it was surreal to hear an American pretending he got his accent in France.
Now, of course, AL makes all the big machines that keep the net and mobile networks running. Fittingly for a descendant of Bell Labs, it is the short stubby, frantic pair of legs that keeps the telecommunication swan moving gracefully across the lake. No AL, no ‘Net in other words.
Houston, however, has a problem. It would be great for us to all have gadgets and computers that can talk to each other and share info – the ‘Three Screen World’ as it were. But at the moment they can’t, and the solution is hard to reach at the moment. Put simply we’ve learned how to use the tech but not how to make money out of it, and a happy world where PC may speak unto Blackberry seems far away as a result. Utopia doesn’t come for free, alas.
The next speaker was David Banes, of charity AbilityNet, which aims to bring IT to the disabled. He rather stood out with his black suit, grey stripy tie and metallic silver Boris Johnson-style mop top hairdo. But his presentation was more compelling still. David argued that technology had the capability of bringing the disabled back into the workforce, to allow those who couldn’t work or weren’t able to work as much suddenly compete on equal terms with the able-bodied. It could also allow them to stay in work, and off benefits, or go the whole hog and become entrepreneurs.
David also pointed out that there were social benefits for disabled people using technology. For example, one could now have shopping delivered right to one’s door. This means you and your helper now had more time to go off and do other things (like go to the pub, for example) rather than spend time slogging around a supermarket. Ironically technology is helping the disabled to spend less time being, well, disabled. David then admonished the audience – we were all just NODYS (NOt Disabled Yet) and don’t let’s forget it! Or else.
And on such an optimistic note there followed a Q&A session with one Scottish woman being particularly attached to the microphone. I felt a strange urge to ask: “I run a small clan of ninjas whose principle means of communications – carrier pigeons and couriers disguised as blind wandering monks – are no longer practical in today’s demanding climate. In regards to the garrotting and stabbing industries, and walking as one with the shadow, how might social networking and PDAs be of benefit?” But for some reason, I decided against it.
But then there was a break and that meant only one thing. More coffee and biscuits!
The exhibition zone was in the same room as where the coffee (and later, lunch) was being served. All around businesses were all trying to sell The Next Big Thing. One stall even had a magician doing card tricks. They all knew the only way to find out if their idea was any good or not was to just charge forth into the dark and see if they got to where they were going. Or at least get someone to buy it.
After caffeine, and before I went into the main conference hall, I handed in a scrunched up, coffee stained feedback form to the reception. “Can I get my free pen drive now?” I grinned nervously.
Back at the event, David Livermore was pushing us onwards – we were behind schedule, but by heavens we were going to press on! (At least until lunch.)
Some time later, the third standout speaker, Marcus Pullen of Aspin Technologies, played it for laughs with a sort of bouncy I’m-a-business-clown approach. This was inevitable given that some conference presentations I’ve been to in previous years can be so eye-flayingly DULL, and it did make his case more clear. The first half of Marcus’s message was that good old-fashioned shop retail might be undergoing a renaissance as punters go for the more personal touch. We all want to at least look at the person flogging us socks, it seems, and in that sense the honeymoon for the ‘Net was over. Plus, it didn’t help that using computers felt a lot like work – a chore rather than an escape – as we’re stuck in front of them all the time these days.
On the other hand, though, online shopping has allowed for shifts in consumer behaviour. Thanks to eBay, Amazon et al, there’s no more relying on shop opening times, for example. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the added bonus of feedback and referrals from other users we could use too. Britain’s frankly rubbish weather and growing adoption of broadband may have helped as well.
But Marcus’ big idea was that the ‘Net is not just about web sites but also communication. Far from putting them out of business, the Web could allow high street retailers to talk directly not only to customers but to warehouses and suppliers too. In conclusion, he argued that the net is indeed a tool but so is the High Street – the trick is in how effectively they are used.
And then the main conference came to a close. David Livermore began some closing thoughts. Certainly, the Web has transformed how retail works but it has actually changed the rules for all other aspects of business in the last few years too. The point to remember was that the Web is a remote salesman.
David then ended with this observation: “Some say that God is with the big battalions, but if that were so, He wouldn’t have given us the Internet!”
Cue lunch and some utter savagery at the finger buffet.
Afterwards, I crept into a relatively empty SME Workshop. I couldn’t help but notice how strangely empty it was. As it turned out, most of the attendees were still gorging themselves on sandwiches and prawn kebabs, but soon the auditorium was full. In essence it was a sort of ‘How I set my business up’ monologue from four entrepreneurs. It was very interesting, but of particular note was JJ Heath-Caldwell, of localsurveyorsdirect.co.uk, who’d already spoken in the first half and was going on for an encore of sorts.
For those that haven’t seen it, his site works on the principle of putting your property details in and then local surveyors will give you an estimate. It cost JJ all of £1.00 to set the site up – but now it had an annual turnover of £200,000, and was one of the few property companies that are still growing in these credit crunch-blighted times.
As for JJ’s approach, it was quite simple:
A. Identify the requirement
B. Identify a way to address it.
C. Identify a cheap way to start the company or to test the market waters.
D. Get the right mix of partners.
E. Make a plan.
F. Implement it.
He made it sound so easy.
And on that note the event came to a close. No doubt the networking carried on at the Pitcher & Piano next door. But I had to wonder – would any of this matter in a decade’s time? To have predicted in 1992 that the business world would be shaken up by geeky devices like modems and e-mail would have got you a few odd glances. And yet, barely 16 years later, we can’t live without such IT. Who knows what the next big thing really will be? As William Gibson put it, “the street finds its own uses for things”, which might make any discussion right now just a bit academic.