The Titanic Belfast is an amazing space. The event was held on level 5 in the Titanic, Olympic and Britannic Suites as well as The Bridge on level 6. This was the same venue used for my sisters wedding in August-the first Big Fat Indian-Scottish-Northern Irish Wedding at this venue!!!!
The registration was open from 8am on the ground floor. We were then whisked up to level 5 for a light breakfast. We were spoilt with an array of freshly prepped pastries, tea and delightful coffee.
Digital DNA was the brainchild of Gareth Quinn and Ryan Owens and started in 2012. It's message was simple- to help businesses grow and expand by embracing the power of digital technology.
The day was pretty packed:
Over 400 delegates were in for a real treat. The first thing of note was the "favour boxes" courtesy of MCS, which included sweets, a power bank and a pen:
The conference was kicked off by the Host Kate Marshall who was MC for the day. She introduced Prof Mark from Aberdeen who really livened us all up with the Boom Whackers which are rhythmic band instruments which are really hollow coloured (red,orange,green,yellow and green) tuned percussion tubes. Basically we all banged these against our hands and energised ourselves, a great ice breaker.
The first speaker was Jane White from Twitter who talked about the Power of Everyday. She told us that we unlock our phones on average 150 times a day, that we send 500 million tweets a day, our average attention span is 8 seconds and that tweets sent per month in the subjects of tech, food and fitness are 554,66 and 16 million respectively. So we can see that tweets are a signal of interest or intent.
Michael O'Hara (a QUB grad) was up next and he championed that NI should be a Mobile First Company/Society ie developer mobile tech (4g/5g) and then apps and tech for every day life. This is greatly spurred on by provision of Mobile Data Sets (New York has 1300 whilst Belfast only has 6!!). He also said that Israel with a population of 8 million has 700 new tech companies and 18 IPO,s beats NI hands down!!
Jeremiah Grossman, from White Hat Security, talked about being a paid hacker (started with Yahoo) and has an office here in Belfast-all very dependent on our superb skilled and educated workforce.
After the coffee break Gareth Quinn then introduced Liam and Sam, two 14 year olds from Dominican College, who won a competition for their business app. Their prize was a trip to Silicon Valley to visit Google,Facebook and Stanford Uni- nice prize!!
There were then three presentations by Kevin, who launched a product to help help convert digital audiences to customers ie simple social commerce, Opal Perry from Allstate NI who explained the power of pitching (Allstate started from a pitch to a Sears executive on a train in the USA in 1931) and finally Eleanor McEvoy who is the boss at Budget Energy who really was truly inspirational- she has no degree yet is a true entrepreneur now in her third business.
I then attended a workshop named Digital Transformation for the Third Sector before we broke for lunch.
This was steamed rice, chicken supreme, veggie penne pasta and salad, followed by delightful mini desserts.
After lunch we saw a superb video of Pat Quinn an ALS sufferer who talked about his disease and about the Ice Bucket Challenge. He highlighted the power of social media in that over millions of people engaged in this.
Which brings me onto Andrew Weld-More from Facebook who gave us a timeline of tech and how quick it's changed. For example 900 million people access Facebook on mobiles per day and that the next wave of media will be video and virtual/actual reality!!
Already we have seen the rapid March of tech in all forms of life. We must embrace it as its here to stay.
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