A Week in Leicester
The highlight of the week for me has to be having met Toyah Wilcox – amazing experience. She was about to go live on stage at the FSB Annual Conference… and we met up in the holding room first for introductions. Amazingly pleasant and despite crutches due to an injury she put the effort in to give us some decent photos…
As IT Director it is my job at our conferences to ensure our presence on the web includes topical reporting, imagery, video and this year – social media.
On the social media front it is our first shot at doing this properly at one of our conferences and everything worked wonderfully well, with nice comments coming in throughout.
The delegates (several hundred) arrived on Thursday for the AGM (in which new national officers such as the chairman are elected), at Curve, Leicester (don’t ask why they don’t call it “The Curve”)followed by 2 days of debates, resolutions and exhibition.
Friday after a very early start, I caught John Allan – the new National Chairman, in our hotel and video interviewed him on the spot – John has some strong views on out of town parking as you’ll see – the video is on the FSB website along with many other videos.
Later in the morning we had an excellent talk by Peter McAvoy of Google – I met him some months ago in Southern Ireland while at an ESBA meeting at Google’s HQ.
He talked about Google’s ideas and in particular, Google Glass which is a fascinating project about to come to fruition and involving micro-miniature circuitry effectively putting the power of a modern mobile into a set of glasses with transparent projection in front of your eyes. The video explains what they’re trying to achieve.
The rest of Friday was taken up with various policy-related talks and we had the RT Hon Vince Cable doing his thing along with other political speakers including the RT Hon Owen Paterson.
The exhibitions included Dell and Microsoft (the latter funded the excellent Friday night drinks reception) as well as the guys from ESBA (European Small Business Alliance) – Saturday saw more of the same culminating in the talk by Toyah Wilcox.
The whole lot is up on the web (I should add that was surrounded by an excellent team of staff and volunteers who’re working hard to make sure this all runs smoothly – but these photos are my own). Here are some more pics from the event.