The Fantastic Tavern usually takes place of an evening with plenty of discussion, fun, pizza and the odd beer or three. The Lock Inn was a day long version with 3 different tracks: Innovation (sponsored by yours truly), Craft and Effectiveness and 9 different speakers (plus a couple thrown in for good measure between sessions).

After stuffing our faces with bacon butties and pastries (it’s a hard life), Matt Bagwell kicked off the day with a review of the key trends picked out back in January as being ones to watch out for in 2010. Since the January Fantastic Tavern, Matt realised the trends discussed at the beginning of the year are actually not a prioritised list but a mish-mash of ideas, some of which will work, others won’t, but we can’t necessarily predict that success or failure.

He then ran through the predicted trends and showed how events of the past 6 months demonstrated their relevance (or otherwise). For example, Foursquare and Scvngr encourage you to engage in a fun and playful way – and playfulness was the winning trend back in January.

Matt’s experiences reinforced the idea that we can use social media to get results in customer service – comments on an expensive Pizza Express meal meant his comments got presented to the board and hopefully changed the way they work. In contrast, clothing label Mandarina Duck weren’t available to deal with his complaint and when they did eventually surface simply told him the part he needed wasn’t available, sorry. This terrible experience  was of course then shared to all their followers. The opportunity to improve the brand perception was completely lost. The social web can guide purchasing decisions – if you want to buy something you ask friends in similar circumstances what they have and then buy on their recommendation.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle describes the trajectory of technologies as they arrive in society. We watch what’s on the rise and also expect those at the peak to drop off – into the aptly named ‘trough of disillusionment’ and then finally to the ‘plateau of enlightenment/productivity’ where it becomes useful and part of how we live. These types of models are most useful for enterprises/CIO’s. However this model itself is being disrupted – for example there are so many different kinds of micro blogging and they move so fast there’s no time to plot where they are on the model.

So out of all the new technological tools, how do you work out what to hang onto?

3 things are firmly established:

- Social Web

- Data Deluge

- Data: emotion mining

Individuals get to decide how they bring data into the world and how they deploy it, resulting in the layering of media and experiences. Anthony recommends you choose your toolkit, make sure you think big (trend) and small tech and be bold and agile with what you decide.

Innovation is about redesigning and improving things that exist already (nothing is new) – ideas come from a diverse number of sources. The trick is to partner with different organisations and entities to make innovation happen. Partnering enables you to:

- Extend your sales reach

- Extend your influence

- Expand your capabilities and competencies

- Improve your credibility

Kathy then asked how you move from being reactive to being innovative? She encouraged us to play the ‘Jedwood Game’ – this involves partnering with someone, joining your names together and then working out how your skills complement each other, and selling it in a sentence to the rest of the group. So, for example:

Hish: Focus is content management, email management

Sara: Produces content and exposes it

Together we are Saraish: We take artefacts people are concerned about and using software make it real for them

The ‘7 C’s’ are the reasons people have partnerships. We went through all the different benefits, for example:

Coverage (extending sales reach)

Capability (you can’t do everything brilliantly, focus on what you do well and partner with people who do the other things you need)

Credibility (Certified partners/people will vouch for you/risk offsetting)

Compatibility

Competitiveness

Conflict

Communication

Culture

Champions

Contracts

Kathy concluded that you need to partner to ensure you understand all the elements above and grow them as part of your business strategy.

We covered Tricky’s session on The secrets of sketching earlier in the week.

The day closed with an awards ceremony celebrating ideas in Innovation, Craft and Effectiveness – and of course plenty of drinking and networking.

See you at the next Fantastic Tavern event!

Clear your diary on 23rd September! The hub of creativity that is The Fantastic Tavern is hosting The Lock Inn, a day long event  based on three themes:

Innovation

Effectiveness

Craft

Each theme has three sessions, each one running for about an hour  – and you get to choose to attend three sessions from any theme during the day.

To round off the day, The Lock Inn will hold the first ever Fantastic Awards – entries are still being accepted so if you’ve created something amazing in the fields of Innovation, Effectiveness or Craft that you know will stand up to the examination of the Taverners panel of judges, then enter the Awards – its easy and free! There’ll be beers, wine and pizzas to keep you going too. 

To join the fun, RSVP now to michelle.flynn@emc.com. See you there!

EMC Consulting’s very own Matt Bagwell played host for a Fantastic Tavern evening in the Cloud, giving an entertaining and interesting introduction to the evening’s entertainment.

The format for the evening was 5 companies pitching fictitious applications that are hosted in the cloud to 3 dragons. The audience get 50% of the vote, while the dragon’s vote makes up the remaining 50%. The victor gets the kudos – oh and a prize too (unfortunately for them, not the money they request for investment!)

Attendees were also challenged to amend the following statement: ‘Cloud computing is not relevant to creatives because its just another hosting platform’. Anyone who fancies sending alternatives/amendments feel free to tweet #TFTLondon or via email to Matt Bagwell – you can even send it via snail mail, whatever takes your fancy. The best suggestion will win a prize, so get your thinking caps on!

The Dragons

Adrian McDonald is EMC Consulting’s Vice President & General Manager for UK & Ireland and is responsible for overall revenue generation, management and business strategy of the region for EMC. Based at EMC’s UK & Ireland headquarters in Brentford, Middlesex, Adrian is also charged with ensuring that EMC Sales, Technology Solutions, Customer Service, and Partner/Alliance groups understand and communicate the unique value that EMC brings to its customers and business partners.
Ralf Jeffery is a Business Analyst and certified SCRUM Master with a proven track record of creating e-commerce strategies and Web 2.0 solutions that either enhance existing business operations or deliver new business streams. Experienced in multi-channel customer engagement, technology road mapping, Agile development methodologies and digital marketing strategy, his sector experience includes retail, financial services, recruitment and environmental start-ups, within the UK, Europe and USA.
Phil Carter is a founding partner of Carter Wong Design agency. Founded in 1984, together they are a team of multi-disciplined communications experts working across branding, digital, literature and packaging.

Pitch 1

What? iLife: Life as a  Service for the digital native

Who? Lee Provoost, Headshift

iLife is a subscription based product that has the customer locked in through their life cycle, which can be up to 80 years. The model re-uses services that are already out there. Initially, six components are offered to help you manage your life. iLife Baby – check baby name availability and suggest unique names and register social networks for you.

• iLife travel to synch travel
• iLife dating to avoid disaster dates
• iLife parents keep track of children’s spending
• iLife friends
• iLife divorce – sends an email to break up for you

All accessed from the iLife hub. iLife simply pulls all the services together and lets you access it from one place, helping smooth and streamline your life.

How much does it cost? Follows SCRUM cycle model – projection is to build the programme which will cost £1m.

Revenue: Free for the user and can turn them into paying users – premium and family subscriptions with the potential for 80 years of revenue from each customer!

Dragon’s feedback

Overall: Liked the concept and presentation but slightly sceptical due to large numbers and no marketing in the business model/costs, plus what’s the value when this is simply an aggregator of other people’s web services?

Pitch 2

What? Q-Baloo: Social Reservations

Who? Simon Munroe, EMC Consulting

If you follow the usual channels for purchasing tickets for events you run the risk of falling foul of ticket touts, frustration at spending ages waiting to see if you can buy a ticket and ultimately, disappointment. It can be very difficult to purchase tickets for popular events.

How can we turn this around using cloud computing?

The Q-Baloo application keeps the buzz and fun going when people are waiting for ours in a queue – i.e. selling t-shirts, accessories and even jump the queue. Q-Baloo uses the time spent in a queue to upsell, reinforce the brand and add the idea of competition and fun while they’re sitting in the queue, with applications like foursquare. Q-Balloo also allows people to leave the queue as long as they’re tracked (I liked that part best!). Also allows people to jump the queue (yep, good too!).

Dragon’s feedback: Concept is brilliant, dragons loved it, business plan is solid and hits a real pain point (queuing is a real bugbear).

Pitch 3

Scorepedia: Real time sports scores from any sporting event

Who? Jamie Thomson, Blink Tank Consulting

This applications enables real time sports scores on any sporting event, anywhere. You can access the scores with a smartphone and all the scored are input by the spectators. The application takes the crowdsourcing model and uses it to report scores on any sports – not just the big events but small local five a side games and other local team events.

Contributions are rewarded by a reputation based model (Scorepedia bragging rights) and current games as well as scores from yesteryear are all welcome. Real time data can be sent out via RSS feeds. You pay for what you use and the system is wholly scalable (as it’s hosted in the cloud) and mobile.

The revenue streams include targeted advertising opportunities, for example custom dashboards for your favourite team selling related products. Also once data is collected and aggregated there’s real value in that information to re-sell.

Dragon’s feedback: Good idea overall, very inventive idea – but would like to see more marketing. Much of the data is already available online and so the dragons saw revenue as selling the application rather than advertising. Why would people use it when the majority of the data is already available online?

*******************************PIZZA BREAK!!*******************************************

Pitch 4

Ui2: Unified Infrastructure intelligence

Who? Matt Mould from EMC Consulting

For most companies the services they use are all over the place and from different companies with different systems, e.g. Microsoft online, Google docs, etc.

What’s the impact of U12? It enables enterprise companies to monitor, manage and carry out transactions, whether via public or private cloud services, all in one place. It can run on a PPC model, so every time you click that service you’re charged .25p – but don’t have to built your own custom version.There’s also the U12 pay per module = £15,000 per annum per module and finally the full blown enterprise version which is £60,000 per annum

Dragon’s feedback: Loved the concept, including the logo (except one of the dragons’, who hated it!) and message ‘take control’ – numbers are great. However needed to validate the model lots of people offer similar services so how is it unique or how does it deliver better than the competitors?  One of the best presentations of the night, simple idea.

Pitch 5

Cheatr: Cheat at online gambling!

Who? Simon Gallagher, ioko

This pitch didn’t ask for cash, it was all about making a fast buck as quickly as possible… and then run! Cheatr gathers data on gambling behaviour from running mass online gambling activity. It then offers advice and guidance to the gamblers to help them beat the casinos and win as much money as possible. This would be the paid for service. Genius!

So phase 1 would be to use crowdsourcing to get developers and geeks involved. Cheatr won’t pay people, but uses a revenue share model that’s reputation based, tracking contributions and mapping it to the return. Cheatr would therefore build a loyal tribe who build all the apps.

Phase 2 = commercialisation.By automating hundreds of thousands of games, finding the logic behind the games and do the number crunching in the cloud, Cheatr optimises online gambling and gives punters the feedback they need to help them win, including machine learning and observed patterns.

There’s by no means an infinite lifespan- in fact the risk is a hefty fine or prison!

Dragon’s feedback: Brilliant, taking the piss out of gambling associations. However the dragons value their passport – it’s too risky! A great idea overall and would be great to couple it with a counting system!

In joint second place were Cheatr and iLife…

And the winner was…

Q-Baloo!

The next Fantastic Tavern event is the 19th August for the ‘lock-in’. This day long event starts with breakfast, then moving onto workshops and culminating in an evening awards ceremony.

More from Matt Bagwell’s blog if you want to see the actual presentations.

In the meantime, I’m getting a serious case of deja vu with this Dragon’s Den format, that’s two in one week!

OK, so I’ve always had a vivid imagination and love virtual reality, 3D and the more recent Augmented Reality as they blur the lines between what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. So when I was invited to join The Fantastic Tavern for an evening on ‘Realities’, nothing short of an ‘act of God’ was going to stop me being there to find out more.

The evening kicked off with a humorous introduction from EMC’s Matt Bagwell, who framed the evening as an exploration of Augmented Reality – is it a fad or is it here to stay, a technology that has commercially viability? 

Matt took us back to the early 90’s, when blending realities became pervasive – starting with the fantastic game ‘Doom’ and moving to the military and their use of data by blending reality with an information layer. After providing the context for the evening, Matt left it to the speakers to explain what Augmented Reality actually is and how do you work with it – what’s good about it and what’s not so good? How can it ‘permeate the everyday’?

First up was Paul Dawson, Experience Director of EMC Consulting, who gave an overview of the definitions and roles of ‘realities’ by presenting a number of examples, including the best and the worst.

Paul held up The Terminator as being a great example of augmented reality (referring to the first film in the series and in my opinion the best). He also mentioned that the first Augmented Reality head up display in a car was back in 1988 (Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme) – a great ‘did you know’ if I’ve ever heard one.

He then moved on to popular iPhone apps like Tube Finder, and asked if there was really any difference between the services offered by Tube Finder and those provided by a compass? He made the great observation that in practice, what tends to happen with apps like these is that too much of the data is incorrect – one example was data showing Southwark Tube station sits on top of EMC’s offices…

Paul then asked ‘…so what does work’? Augmented Reality currently only uses dimensions and not senses. What we want to know is information that directly affects us – for example, what we want to know is queue times in the local Tesco, or the nearest ATM and whether it has cash in it. Paul moved the discussion a step further by asking how we bring senses into the mix?  What if we could listen to conversations in a room to help us decide which ones to join – essentially a tag cloud?

The conclusion was there are some beacons of hope emerging where not only correct data but also relevant data is added into the melting pot, indicating Augmented Reality could stay relevant and commercially viable.

Paul was followed by Johannes Kebeck, Technical Specialist for Bing Maps in EMEA. Johannes focused on Bing services (no surprises there!) to demonstrate what advancements in augmented information means for anyone who uses maps (i.e. all of us who invariably stumble around a strange town or city at some point).

Johannes talked about the number of new (or seemingly new) developments in technology in general and how they can be applied to mapping. He referred to Crowd Sourcing, for example, to harness the power of the community and of course referred to the ubiquitous Flickr photos rendering historic images onto maps to provide historic context – see the TED session by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

But then the deeper questions were asked: How do we interact with this? How do we talk to it? Johannas drew on an example used at an art gallery where visitors can not only zoom into the building but drill right down to view a specific painting and get all relevant data on that item.

But how easy is it to use? It’s no easy task to stitch hundreds or thousands of images together. However, with the help of a free Microsoft tool called ICE, or Image Composite Editor, an advanced panoramic image stitcher, images are seamlessly and automatically sewn together – plus for the user the information is only a couple of mouse clicks away.

Content is becoming richer and richer – users can not only zoom right into objects but zoom out to see the stars and the moon, all from a mobile phone.

Johannes also pointed out a local sensor application to highlight relevant data about an area, with the demonstration he gave focussing on real time news about crimes happening round the corner integrated into the map view, for example images and text update confirming a criminal was apprehended after breaking and entering.

But how do we augment reality with spatial information?If I see a house for sale nearby, I want to know how much it costs. Or if I visit the ‘House of Versailles’, I want to find out where the disabled entrance is, where the toilets are, etc. It’s possible to superimpose data onto the image through the camera using geo spatial information. This is technology that people already understand. Sometimes sticking your mobile phone out and staring at a tiny screen is limiting and can be dangerous!

Johannes rounded up the session with a fascinating peak into the future to a world where contact lenses are not only used to improve vision and change the colour of our eyes but actually function as an LED computer display. personally, I can’t wait for that!

Finally (from a speaker POV that is), the EMC Consulting creative team, aka Glennis McGregor, Matt Ratcliffe and Chris Gannon talked about the practicalities and challenges of working on various realities applications, including pushing the immersion factor, using games to create an ‘Augmented Virtuality’ with the aim of empowering teams and enhancing training. Finally, of course you need to consider health and safety, with the ideal being that the Augmented Virtuality environment is actually safer than reality.

The evening was rounded off with a Q&A session where random questions could be fired at the panel of speakers from the increasingly rowdy audience (fuelled by the freely flowing beer and sausage fest that kept everyone’s stamina up throughout the evening). Although there were a number of very interesting questions – including whether games inhibit creativity and individual expression and the danger of encouraging people to do things in a virtual world they may feel is OK in the real world – the best question of the night was whether Augmented Reality was being used in the adult entertainment sector… accompanied by cheers of encouragement by the audience.

The final poignant question ‘How do you mediate the important information from the vast amount of data? Who controls it? How much filtering will you have to do to get the information you need?’ was deemed too good to answer and left for future pondering.

The quick poll was between the iPad or sausage – and sausage won hands down!!

After that it was time for the 100 or so crowd to continue drinking, eating sausages and of course network, network, network.

All in all an interesting, insightful way to spend a Thursday evening. Cheers!

Find out more about EMC and The Fantastic Tavern, plus there’s a new event called ‘The Lock’ scheduled for 19th August – essentially 3 taverns running 3 streams on 3 different themes and run by the Fantastic Tavern team.

P.S. Michael McClary ate all the sausages while I was writing this!