Hi, it’s Mike here. I’m head of technology at W+K London.

Last week I spent two days with five and half thousand business leaders, evangelists and developers looking at what the future holds for business in all industries. It was a very thought provoking few days with excellent examples of amazing technology with clever implementations. The business day was targeted at business leaders looking at digital transformation for their companies. Even though it’s the current buzzword doesn’t decrease the importance digital transformation and disruption will have on all companies large and small.

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Both days were incredibly interesting but a few things really stood out.

Attendance – Five and half thousand people looking to understand what will happen to their businesses in the coming years. That many business leaders and developers looking to learn what technologies will disrupt their business says a lot.

RAC – A one hundred and twenty year old company that fixes cars at the road side have one of the best digital transformation ideas I have ever seen, their telematics hardware. It’s a mobile enabled dongle that plugs into the ODB II port that helps drivers; drive safer, reduce fuel consumption, provide service notifications and report what is wrong when a car breaks down. They transformed the communication with their customers from two points (renewal and breakdown – both unpleasant experiences) to a multifaceted ecosystem designed to benefit their customers. I think that’s pretty average so here’s the kicker – people won’t be driving cars in the future, so a well established platform designed to remotely monitor self driving cars and diagnose faults just might have a huge market in the next five years. Now that’s clever, a hundred year old company fit and ready for the twenty first century.

Blockchain – An immutable, distributed ledger that is as yet, tamper proof. It’s a difficult technology to explain as there’s nothing to see but think of it like a book you can write in and never ever change. If you did try and change it, then the book won’t make sense. Also, anyone you want can contribute to the book and it’s not stored in one place but lots of places. It’s amazing and will completely transform our financial institutions and many other industries, the prototype that was discussed halves the number of agents in any share trade whilst maintaining trust and security.

Hololens – Very early days for this technology but has so much promise. It’s a mobile headset that projects 3D objects on to your surroundings. Microsoft is calling this blended reality, where digital objects appear embedded into the physical surroundings. It has a series of cameras that see the user environment and can pin 2D and 3D objects to any location. The fact that the tech can pack so much into such a small headset is impressive. The field of view is narrow at the moment but that can only be improved with time.
Micro movement detection – A fascinating talk from Abe Davis that covered his teams research into detecting micro movements of object with DSLR cameras. You should have already seen his work detecting sound from a crisp packet. Well, we got a preview of the latest iteration of the micro movement tech. They can now build a physical representation of how an object moves based on it’s micro movements. From there they can then morph the video image and move the object in a completely plausible manner. In the future, this will lead to augmented reality apps digital content being able to realistically interact and animate with the physical objects. This could be something to watch for in the coming years.
Cognitive Services – A worthy mention as it’s an interesting offering from Microsoft. They have packaged complicated computer vision (computers being able to see and comprehend what is in the image) and natural language processing (computers being able to comprehend written or spoken words) into a simple API. This enables developers to build complicated functionality into their apps at a vastly reduced time and technical skill level. Computers being able to comprehend images and words is going to be crucial in developing future human/computer interfaces. Keep an eye on “conversation as the UI” in the coming years as API’s like this reduces the barrier to entry for brands to build more innovative experiences.
A thoroughly thought provoking two days and was great to get hands on with a lot of demos from Microsoft. Will be keeping an eye out for next years conference.