Technology events are starting to re-open face-to-face, but are we ready to attend? Many people only want to join virtual events. So what can we expect in 2021 and how will events change in 2022? Tech Trends Podcast asks a successful event organiser, Giles Cummings, and a top keynote speaker, Matt Hatton for their views on the way forward. Plus, are we witnessing Peak Tech? Big Tech firms face big problems in East and West. And we gawp at $69 million spent on one digital artwork.
Podcast transcript:
Jeremy Cowan 0:04
Hi, and welcome to the latest Tech Trends Podcast brought to you by VanillaPlus.com, The Evolving Enterprise (TheEE.ai) and IoT-Now.com. I’m Jeremy Cowan, and I want to thank you for joining us for today’s sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted look at digital transformation for enterprises.
Now, our two guests are from diverse backgrounds. But the three of us kind of share an interest in one thing, and that’s tech events. One is an organiser. One is a keynote speaker, and I’m a sometimes moderator. As we know, some event brands have really suffered in 2020, but not all of them. As our first guest proves. I can’t think of anyone better to start this discussion than Giles Cummings, founder and CEO of the successful FutureNet World series of events. These telecom conferences are now, I think, in their third year; Giles will correct me if that’s wrong, and still growing fast. So today, I want to look for positives, finding out what lessons can be learned from the horrors of 2020/’21 in the tech sector, and ask what tech events will actually look like in the future. So, Giles, thanks for joining the podcast.
Giles Cummings 1:29
My pleasure, nice to be here.
Jeremy Cowan 1:31
And now for his sins, our next guest attends even more tech events than I do. In fact, every time I poke my nose into a conference hall, it seems I find he’s already up there speaking, which means I should probably try to get there on time. He is Matt Hatton, who speaks as co-founder of the analyst firm Transforma Insights, which specialises in IoT and digital transformation for enterprises. A warm welcome back to the pod, Matt.
Matt Hatton 2:02
Thank you, Jeremy. Nice to be here again.
Jeremy Cowan 2:03
It’s good to have you both here. Okay, we’re going to share some key technology news that each of us has seen lately. And then we’ll be kicking around our thoughts on the future of live and virtual tech events worldwide, before finally in What The Tech we’ll chew over some of the stories that made us stop and look again recently. Giles first. What news have you noticed, Giles?
Giles Cummings 2:31
Yeah, well, my story, not surprisingly, is related to events and perhaps our discussion today about the future of events. So, this is a story that followed Ericsson’s announcement to pull out of Mobile World Congress at the beginning of last week. It was late last Monday that they announced their withdrawal, citing continued health and safety concerns, amid the ongoing pandemic. Now, remember that Ericsson were the first major exhibitor to withdraw from the event last February, and it was it was like a pack of cards as the others very quickly followed suit and led to the unfortunate cancellation of the event.
This time is a little different. Right after Ericsson’s announcement, TelcoDR CEO, Danielle Royston posted something on LinkedIn, saying she would be happy to take over Ericsson stand space in Hall Two. Now, she didn’t have to wait too long for an answer from GSMA who responded on LinkedIn saying immediately ‘Yep, let’s do it’. And Danielle Royston, as you may know, she’s a former CEO of Optiva. Now, she’s got this idea that she’s going to fill a booth normally given over to base station equipment largely, with an entourage of public cloud specialists. Which is very interesting because many of the companies that Royston champions are a challenge to the traditional model favoured by Ericsson, Huawei, Nakia and Co., who are ordinarily the biggest sponsors of the event and GSMA’s major paymaster. However, the GSMA has jumped on to this PR opportunity and on the 12th of March, which was only four days after Ericsson’s withdrawal, issued an official press release announcing TelcoDR as a brand new exhibitor, taking over 6,000 square metres of space with a title, ‘MWC is going public cloud’.
So, is this a Get Out of Jail card for GSMA, I wonder? Is this gonna pivot Mobile World Congress, make it more about a public cloud, allowing the disruptors into the exhibition space that has always been the domain of the traditional equipment vendors. It remains to be seen. So, that was an interesting piece of news that grabbed my attention this week, Jeremy.
Jeremy Cowan 4:50
Yeah. My first thought Giles, I’m ashamed to admit it, was that I’m certainly going to miss Ericsson’s catering. (Laughter). More importantly, I guess this means, as you say, Ericsson won’t be on hand to defend the traditional private cloud model. And in the longer run, you’ve got to wonder whether or not this will damage relations between the GSMA and the incumbent network equipment providers. Matt, what’s your what’s your take on that?
Matt Hatton 5:18
I think, much as you, my immediate thought is there’s a lot of analysts and journalists who get at least two meals a day at the Ericsson booth, and they’re hoping that the new arrivals will be equally generous with their catering. But I think one of the interesting things for me is that there’s always been a nudge towards Mobile World Congress becoming more of a general technology show rather than being so tightly focused on mobile – to the point where, you know, maybe you think about calling it Telecoms World Congress, or something along those lines. And maybe this is a slight encouragement to move in that direction, maybe it changes the direction of the of the show a little bit, I think it’s quite easy to read a lot in, as we’ve generally done in 2020, read a lot into what happens in one year being extrapolated out to what happens in in future years, you know. It’s this idea of digital transformation two years, or 10 years, or whatever years’ worth of digital transformation happening in two months, or 10 months or whatever. But it’s only a digital transformation, if it sticks. And it’s the same with this. Do we think Ericsson will be back in 2022? You can bet they will be. And will they want their traditional place? I’m pretty sure they will. And I’m pretty sure that they’ll have their chequebook open. So, I think it’s a little easy to read too much into it.
Jeremy Cowan 6:43
Yeah, I think money will definitely talk on that in 2022.
Giles Cummings 6:47
No, I think so. I mean in terms of catering, and perhaps entertainments, you might get a better experience with Danielle. Because, I mean, she’s no mug to PR, as you probably know. And she’s mentioned one idea she’s already got building a tennis court in that Hall, getting Nadal on along for a hit. So, you know, this sounds like fancy, but it perhaps isn’t. She’s a pretty formidable tennis player, as I understand it, is ranked in the top 30 I believe in the over 45s in the world of tennis. So, it’s not wholly unrealistic.
Jeremy Cowan 7:25
Yeah. And she’s very smart on the PR front, as you rightly pointed out. Matt, which tech story caught your eye recently?
Matt Hatton 7:32
This is something I saw on a website called Smart-energy.com, but you’ll probably find it elsewhere. It relates to Microsoft, and a partnership with Total, a French oil, petrol, various petrochemicals type company. And being a typical analyst, what I’m looking at is not specifically the story itself, but more the trends that it indicates. And what it’s doing is demonstrating a real change for Microsoft and how far Microsoft has come as an organisation. So, the interesting thing, being a Microsoft-watcher, is noting how they’ve extended the product offering, developed it so that it almost looks like an out-of-the-box digital transformation for a lot of the vertical sectors that they address with the products that they call Industry clouds. And that seems to be increasingly important as an end-to-end product suite for them. Almost to the point where you … well, we’re not quite there yet, but you’re getting towards the point of maybe not needing or certainly not needing as much of an input from systems integrators. There’s a sort of DIY digital transformation feel to it. I mean, it’s not DIY (do it yourself) obviously, because there’s a lot of hard work and thought gone into a set of products that are there. But it’s very much an off-the-shelf digital transformation, which I think is pretty interesting. Now, Total being a huge organisation, I imagine in their case, there’s going to be quite a lot of customisation involved. But if you’re say a bank with 10 or 12 branches in the US Midwest, you can buy a financial services package from Microsoft, and that will provide you with just about everything you need. Now, to a certain extent, it’s just a skim on Teams and a skim on a bunch of other products, some of the robotic process automation capabilities that Microsoft’s got and so on. But it certainly does the job. So, that’s what caught my eye.
Jeremy Cowan 9:48
Yeah. So, in short, Redmond will be buying greener electricity, and I guess we’ll just have to see how Microsoft’s cloud and particularly AI (artificial intelligence) solutions will help it cut its greenhouse emissions.
Matt Hatton 10:02
Absolutely.
Jeremy Cowan 10:04
Thanks, Matt. The tech story I want to raise isn’t one story at all, really. I guess it’s more of a trend. I think we’re all used to the idea that totalitarian regimes like China’s restrict access to their markets for big tech companies from overseas like Google and Amazon. Google fell victim to the Great Firewall of China as it’s become known, and its market share of searches in China dropped from I think it was 2009 there was a high of over 35% down to 4%, less than 4% last year.
Now it seems the BBC is reporting that even China’s homegrown tech giants are under increasing pressure from Beijing’s regulators who are concerned at the tech giants’ growing influence. Apparently, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has already fined 12 companies, 12 Chinese companies, including Tencent, Baidu, and Didi Chuxing for deals that violated its anti-monopoly rules. A little aside here; I mean, there’s no prizes for spotting the irony in a one-party state being anti-monopoly. But that’s not really my point. What you may not have noticed are the reports last month on the likes of CTV News that India is also rolling out new regulations for social media and digital streaming sites, to make them more accountable for the online content on their platforms and giving the Indian government powers to police it. And meanwhile, I’m sure it didn’t escape your notice, the Australian Government has taken aim at Facebook, although more for not paying for the news, it shares. I mean, Facebook, pushed back by unlisting various Australian News and Information Services, and then quickly backed down and agree a deal for news with Murdoch.
I guess that, no matter where it calls home, Big Tech these days is coming under pressure. And that’s in Australia, UK, Europe and the US to pay more tax and be more accountable. So, there’s no tax protection from the Biden administration, unlike the last one. Editorial and commercial freedom is being reined back in Asia. So, my question to you is, is it time to call this Peak Tech? Is this the high watermark for the tech giants? Matt, what do you think of that?
Matt Hatton 12:46
Well, there’s another one that you didn’t mention actually, Jack Ma at Alibaba was another one of those big tech companies, but wasn’t in your list. But the guy disappeared for quite a while? I’m not even sure if he’s back yet.
Jeremy Cowan 13:01 Last I heard, he’s not.
Matt Hatton 13:02
No. So, a very strange scenario then. The interesting one to watch for me is India and I did a bit of work on this last year. Tremendous amount of interest from tech companies in terms of getting into India. So, we’ve seen Facebook investments, and Google and Microsoft, and so on all, AWS as well, wanting to make investments in the technology sector to get part of what is a substantially growing economy. Thing is, you always see when new technology spaces emerge, it takes a while for the regulatory authorities to catch up. So, thinking just in terms of the basic question of regulation or political input on what are some very significant influencers of public behaviour, public perception, you know, it takes a while for that to kick in. And I think that’s certainly the case here. And it was, I guess, to be expected to a certain extent, there’s always going to be a bit of friction, which gets ignored for the first few years of a new set of technologies’ life. And then, after a while, it starts getting regulated. That’s my take.
Jeremy Cowan 14:24
Yeah. Giles, the thing I wanted to ask you then is, I mean you’re the one here with most experience of putting on live events, let’s pivot to talk about these because this is a really, it’s been a both a horrendous year, but also a year of some opportunity. For those who are fleet of foot. Do you think the pandemic has changed the way the technology events scene is seen forever? Is it going to look any different now as we go forward?
Giles Cummings 14:59
It’s a good question. And I mean, obviously at the moment, it looks very different. And the pandemic, as you say, has turned the events industry upside down, and it forced us all to think about how we serve our customers and communities in a different way. So, I mean, if you turned the clock back 18 months, no one would have believed that we’ve been living through what we have been living through for the past 12 months. And certainly no one could have predicted the impact of the pandemic, the pandemic would have on the events industry, amongst others. I mean, it’s been decimated, with businesses going under, and long-standing annual events being cancelled. In other cases, companies have been forced into reducing the number of events and obviously pivoting their business to a digital model. And the landscape does look very different today. You know, whether that is something that is going to be the landscape forever, is another question. I mean, my own view is we’ve all had to learn very quickly. And everyone in terms of pivoting to digital, so, you know, we’ve, in most cases, turned what were in-person events into virtual events, quick time, and quick turnaround. And everyone has had to learn an enormous amount; from the organisers, like ourselves, the sponsors, the exhibitors, delegates, the speakers, the media, and so on.
And what is very clear is that virtual events are a completely different experience to in-person events. In my opinion, we can never hope to replicate the networking value of in person events. So, certainly in our case, we were able to deliver great content via some pretty cool platforms, and achieve really good engagement with that content. And you can create highly targeted and effective networking opportunities via roundtable discussions, for example, but you can never recreate either the spontaneity of meeting somebody in the coffee break, or the value of an exhibition, for example, via a virtual platform. And a lot of events, obviously, carry pretty sizable exhibitions alongside the conference. And that’s a big, big challenge. You know, if you speak to most people in our industry, and if they’re honest, the virtual exhibition simply doesn’t work. And the technology is there, you know, I don’t want to get into my views on the enormous amounts of virtual platforms that have suddenly emerged over the last 12 months – largely created by people who aren’t events people, but that’s another story. But the tech is there and can offer the functionality to network and visit stands and engage with product teams on stands. But honestly, the willingness is simply not there. So, if the willingness is not there it doesn’t work. And I suppose, in answer to your question, ‘Will the pandemic change events forever?’, my belief is there’s a huge pent-up demand for in-person events. And as soon as it’s safe to travel, and attend live in-person events, they’ll bounce back very quickly.
Jeremy Cowan 18:17
Matt, what’s your thought on this? Do you think people will go back to traveling globally for events? Or will they be more selective if they do so?
Matt Hatton 18:27
I think Giles’ latter point was perhaps the most critical one, in the short term at least. Will people who have been locked indoors for 12 months want to go out and see actual people when they get the chance? (Laughter). I think they probably will. In fact, the expression I would probably pick is ‘desperate’. But there’s a few other dynamics. I mean, I think about why I go to conferences. Two reasons why I go to conferences. One is to get up on the stage, make people think that I’m a smart guy who knows what he’s talking about, hopefully, right? And from that stems the work that we that we do. That’s one element of it.
The other element is kind of about being present. Okay? It demonstrates that we’re part of the ecosystem, part of the markets, that we work in these IoT, and AI and digital transformation spaces. So, it gives people the confidence that you’re there, and you’re part of the ecosystem. And I think that’s the same for vendors as well. Like, to a certain extent, they want to be in Project Mode, but also they just want to be demonstrating that they’re there and they’re part of the ecosystem. Now, you can do that with virtual events to an extent and, you know, I made ample use of virtual events and been involved in quite a lot of them. But it’s a bit difficult to demonstrate presence and demonstrate that you’re a relevant player in the space, and so I think people will go back to in-person events. I really think there’s still a tremendous demand for it. Purse strings might be a little tighter, though, as a result of what looks like a global recession, although the tech sector seems to be pretty healthy, so we’ll see how that goes.
Jeremy Cowan 20:12
It’s certainly doing okay. I mean, echoing Giles’ point about spontaneity, I think the one thing that I found it very hard to replicate through digital events from benefiting in live events is, is that sort of serendipitous moment when you bump into somebody who you’ve never heard of before, you’ve never met before. And it turns out that they are possibly very relevant to what you do. And the two of you can talk about doing something completely new, completely fresh, that you hadn’t even contemplated when you walked in that day. And I love those moments, and it never ceases to amaze me how often they happen.
Matt Hatton 20:54
I completely agree. Everybody talks about them. Well, the water cooler moments, or the over-a-cup-of-coffee kind of kind of moments, it’s those kinds of conversations that you can have. There’s no reason why you can’t spot interesting companies at the virtual events, that’s the only thing. But it’s hard to know where to go looking. And I think I probably still haven’t been to as many virtual events in the last 12 months, as I would have been to proper in-person events, just because I missed the other aspects of it. So, you kind of put yourself into the room. And you commit to spending two days sitting and finding out what’s going on, you don’t sort of drift in and out of it as you would do with virtual events. I tend to find myself a lot more focused, which I think is a useful thing.
Jeremy Cowan 21:38
Giles, you mentioned Mobile World Congress, and they’ve just held their first post-pandemic – if it’s not too early to say so – event in China last month. Do you know if this has taught us as an industry any useful lessons that we can take forward?
Giles Cummings 21:58
Ah, you know, I’m not sure it has. I mean, it attracted 20,000 people visitors over the three days, which is a third of the number that attended in 2019. I mean, the organisers put in, obviously, very stringent and good measures to ensure the health and safety of attendees and processes to ensure regular testing before admittance, you know, social distancing measures, capacity restrictions, flow measures, etc., etc., which are all very necessary. But I think we know that. I don’t think there’s anything there that we don’t know, as organisers. I expect the show was largely domestic, I’m not sure how many international visitors they attracted. I mean, the biggest question for me is around theinternational events, going back to your point about whether people are going to be more selective or not, and the willingness of companies to send staff and the willingness of individuals to travel and attend events? And I certainly don’t think we’re there yet.
Jeremy Cowan 23:00
No. There was some very encouraging research, just a week or two ago from CC Group, a UK-based PR and communications company who put out some research into the type of content people value when trying to learn more about tech vendors. And I noticed in that, I mean not only I’m pleased to say did magazines and websites come out very high as I’m happy to say did analysts, Matt, but events and conferences came in the top five out of 14 categories? With 33%, I think it was, of people saying events are a key source. So that was from research done at the end of last year, beginning of this year. And clearly, the demand is not going away. As you said earlier, Matt, it is pent-up demand and people will be queuing to come again. But I’m not sure that we are there yet.
Giles Cummings 23:59
No, I agree that we’re not there yet. It’s a good point, though. I mean, you know, what’s interesting, and certainly what we’ve learned – and we’ve learned a lot in the last 12 months running virtual events against what was our typical model which was the in-person event – and I mean, sponsors, for example, the vendors. In many cases, they really, had no understanding of what to expect from a virtual event. You know, this was all very new to them. So, expectations around KPIs (key performance indicators) and measures and whether you know, their activities are value or not, all their traditional metrics went out the window. And really, what I think a lot of the vendors now look for in terms of outcomes from participation in the virtual events is very much focused around the thought leadership and the messaging, and less in terms of networking because, as I said earlier, really the networking value is not nearly as high as it is in an in-person event.
So, there’s lots of things at play. There are different models, different, obviously types of events. But I think, you know, the one thing that certainly we need to go back to in terms of, where the events are going in the future is really down to the individuals and the companies and their willingness to travel. And that will dictate really what the events will look like going forward.
Jeremy Cowan 25:37
Yeah. Thank you, gents. Well, we’re into time added on by the fourth official, he’s standing on the touchline waving a board that says five minutes. We’ve reached the final section of the pod called What The Tech where we share something tech-based that either amused or just amazed us. Go on Matt, what struck you?
Matt Hatton 26:00
Every few years, Jeremy, we seem to see a three-letter acronym – sorry, a TLA, I should say (Laughter) – which causes some palpitations amongst experts of some sort, be it economists or art historians in this case. So, I think you have BTC Bitcoin, ICO initial coin offerings. That was quite a big thing about three or four years ago, but you don’t really seem to hear much about initial coin offerings anymore. That caused some concern for economists. The new one is NFTs, non fungible tokens to do with the ownership of digital assets. So, things like Jack Dorsey sold off his first tweet, and lots of other people have been selling off tweets. No one seems interested in my acerbic commentary on the IoT markets up until now, but maybe I just don’t know where I’m supposed to be putting them on sale. (Laughter.)
Anyway, the really eye-catching one, for me was an artist called Beeple who sold an entire digital artwork called ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ for US$69 million. Which seems crazy, but then you know, you compare it to the Mona Lisa, which I’m sure is worth an awful lot more than $69 million. And you think, you know, I could have a copy of the Mona Lisa on my wall. It won’t be the original Mona Lisa. And maybe the same thing applies to digital content. I could have a copy of Beeple’s work on my screen. It wouldn’t be the original one. I mean, it’s not perceptively different from the original. But maybe the art isn’t perceptibly different. It’s just the person who owns the real one knows they own the real one. It gave me something to think about this week.
Jeremy Cowan 27:56
Matt, you’re gonna have to call me a show-off. But if I can’t hang my artwork, on a wall in VanillaPlus Towers, it’s just one more reason – that is, apart from the glaringly obvious – why I won’t be investing 69 million of my hard-earned dollars in a digital picture. I mean, not even $5,000 of them. I don’t care if it’s fungible or non-fungible. (Laughter.)
Matt Hatton 28:18
Surely, not just hanging on the wall. I mean, you’ve got a couple of those sharks cut in half by Damien Hirst, and that sort of thing, right? You’ve got some of those knocking around I’m sure.
Jeremy Cowan 28:27
Yeah, that’s in amongst my art collection, yeah, of course. But apparently, non-fungible tokens – that still sounds rude – non-fungible tokens are different from crypto currencies, and they can’t be traded, and they can’t be exchanged for an equivalent value. So, I still struggle with this.
Matt Hatton 28:49
Yeah, well, it might be like, tulips in Amsterdam in the 17th century. We shall see.
Jeremy Cowan 28:58
It’s a South Sea Bubble? So, you think it might just be their novelty value that makes them valuable? Do you do you think that the fact that the new owner doesn’t hold the copyright and can’t collect royalties will hold it back?
Matt Hatton 29:11
Yeah, yeah absolutely. And it could just be that, you know, if you’d gone back 1,000 years and told somebody that, you know, a piece of canvas with some paint on it was going to be worth millions and millions of dollars, they would have looked at you in disbelief and wondered why you weren’t spending your money ona castle. Or some land. (Laughter.) So, the concept of what’s valuable obviously evolves over time. You could apply the same thing to gold, not inherently valuable, or currency in fact. Fiat currencies. So, these things are only valuable because we all agree that they’re valuable. So if there may be a generational element to it, and maybe the 20-Somethings of today are thinking, ‘Yeah, that seems reasonable’. That’s, well, maybe not at $69 million, it doesn’t seem reasonable. But you know, it seems reasonable that something digital has some inherent value as an original piece. Interesting.
Jeremy Cowan 30:15
I know what She Who Must Be Obeyed would have to say if I turned up having spent $69 million on this, (laughter) but that’s another story. Giles, what’s caught your eye?
Giles Cummings 30:26
A bit of News that caught my eye this week is a piece about a study carried out by researchers from the University of Michigan, Maryland, and Peking. And they’re exploring ways in which employers could predict the work-related behavioural patterns of remote workers and assess the risk that they will resign. And the research focused on developers using GitHub, which is a coding hosting platform that you may know of. But it’s for collaboration and allows you to work with others together on projects remotely. And this study involves the analysis of 63 million GitHub posts from approximately 10 million different developers, analysing the use of emojis. Yes, emojis! (Laughter.) And their correlation to work-related behaviour patterns, such as levels of activity, types of work they do, communication styles, etc., etc.
They’re now looking into the causality between emoji use and work-related outcomes. And specifically, if emojis can be used as an instrument to improve performance, and retention of workers. So, who would have thought that, emojis? And I think really a takeaway from this is that we’re all going to have to think very carefully and be more mindful about how we, and when we, use emojis going forward in the workplace.
Jeremy Cowan 31:52
Yeah. When we’re all working remotely, it’s not such a daft tool for HR departments. But it’s no help at all for those who prefer not to use emojis at all. And I did notice that only, I think the maximum figure in the GitHub survey was 14% of GitHub posts in the study contained emojis. So, employers are going to need a bit more help than that.
Giles Cummings 32:16
Yeah, agreed.
Matt Hatton 32:18
We use GitHub with our developer. I don’t think either I or he or anybody else in our organisation has ever used an emoji in any content on there. (Laughter.) But maybe we are very unusual.
Giles Cummings 32:29
Ah, then it’d be no good for you then, Matt. You’re safe. You’re safe. (Laughter.)
Jeremy Cowan 32:35
Well, there’s just time to tell you about the £15 million – that’s about $21 million – competition that was launched this week in the UK to reduce aviation emissions. Clearly, a worthwhile goal for sure. But can a winner for what they’re calling ‘Green fuels, green skies’ be found just by converting domestic waste into eco-sustainable aviation fuel? That remains to be seen. I guess this is just Biodigester 2.0. It’s a nice idea. I’m not sure if it can be economically viable, but I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.
Apparently, we’ll be turning household rubbish, waste wood, flue gases and, “excess electricity” into green aviation fuel. How much better if we can use it to improve the airlines’ dreadful carbon footprint that we all contribute to when we can fly. So, I’m in favour of the principle, I’m just a little bit skeptical about the path towards it. You can watch out for news of what our politicians, certainly over here in the UK are already calling ‘Jet Zero’. D’you see what they did there? Matt, did you spot this?
Matt Hatton 34:03
I didn’t see it. But it’s good news. I wonder what counts as, what was it, “excess electricity”?
Jeremy Cowan 34:11
Yeah, I was wondering about that. I guess it’s those sources of electricity that can’t be controlled, because they’re more flexible through wind and wave and sunlight, but I’m trying to work it out myself. Anyway, finally, if any of you have seen something amusing, or amazing in the news that you want us to share next time do let us know and we’ll give you a shout out. You can reach me on Twitter. I’m @jcIoTnow.
Time’s up, everyone. Let me finish by saying a big thank you for sharing your expertise with us. First to Giles Cummings of FutureNet World. Giles, where can listeners find out more about your event?
Giles Cummings 35:02
Well, a website is probably the best place to look. So that’s FutureNetWorld.net. And we’ve got our big flagship event coming up in April. So, that’s something to look out for.
Jeremy Cowan 35:14
Well, I can recommend it. I attended the last one, and was lucky enough to moderate a session and it was really fascinating.
And thank you to Matt Hatton of Transforma Insights. Matt, thank you!
Matt Hatton 35:26
My pleasure, Jeremy.
Jeremy Cowan 35:27
Where can people reach you, Matt?
Matt Hatton 35:30
TransformaInsights.com. Transform with an ‘a’ that is.
Jeremy Cowan 35:33
Great. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I can’t let you go without thanking you too for joining us around the world. Don’t forget to subscribe to the pod wherever you found us. And if you can spare a moment, give the pod a 5-star rating and do say something nice about it. It really does make a difference to our ranking.
Anyway, keep safe. And keep checking TheEE.ai, IoT-Now.com and VanillaPlus.com for tech news and features. And join us again soon for another Tech Trends Podcast looking at enterprise digital transformation. Bye for now!
