Creative Digifest #SxSC is now just one week away!

A few tickets are still available for this event on 18th May in the Student Union at Southampton University – you can register here

Our keynote speaker will be Alan Patrick who is the co-founder of Broadsight:

Broadsight focuses on market intelligence, strategy and systems development across the multi-media ecosystem. Broadsight has consulted to many of the major digital-media players in Europe and has helped start or turn around a number of startups. They have also developed innovative technology for a number of clients.

Alan founded Broadsight after a career both consulting to, and working at, senior level for leading global multimedia companies. Prior to setting up Broadsight, he was Managing Director and COO at Jacobs Rimell, who specialise in multi-media OSS systems. Before that he held positions as VP Corporate Development for Globix Corporation in New York, Head of Internet Business Development at British Telecom, and consulted widely on multimedia to a number of major TV and cable companies in his consulting career at McKinsey and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He has worked in the US, Europe, South Africa and the Far East. Alan also writes the well regarded Broadstuff blog on technology development (www.broadstuff.com).

The topic of Alan’s talk is “Technology Hype and Bubbles – Why do they Exist?”

He says: “Over the years Broadsight has done a number of technology trend prediction papers for clients. We use a fairly rigorous system dynamic approach, and one of the things we have found quite interesting is the cyclical (aka Bubble) nature of the industry. I was asked to give a talk on technology prediction at the Design of Understanding conference in January this year, and one of the topics we touched on was the role of bubbles, and hype, in the ‘creative destruction’ process of new business innovation. The part on hype and bubbles drew the most questions, so I have developed a more in depth ‘Part 2’ for the talk, as well as dealing with its interaction with predicting technology evolution. This talk will deal with Creative Destruction, the role of bubbles in these cycles, and the role of hype in creating bubbles – and what you need to look for to understand where you are in the cycle.”

A precis of Part 1 can be found on the Broadstuff blog

Alan will examine how this is applied to (complicates) technology prediction, going through various prediction models and laws. He has also developed the ‘Broadstuff Bubble-o-Meter’ tracking the current Social Media  bubble’s evolution, which has been picked up by other technology blogs and the Guardian. If you wish to read of its developments check out the postings on the Bubblewatch section.

Look out for another post shortly with more information about our other fabulous speakers…and there is still time to volunteer your own talk or demonstration 🙂