Sam Talks Technology

Glenn Shoosmith is the co-founder of JRNI. His new role as Chief Architect ensures Glenn can focus on his passion: building the most complete and effective customer engagement platform.

Glenn founded the company in 2008 following the overly complex, and ineffective scheduling of a squash game, and built it into the $100m+ company it is today.

Hugh MacLeod is the lead artist @gapingvoid. author of #IgnoreEverybody. on a mission to help people lead more creative lives.

Background:

Hugh MacLeod has been drawing about life and business for over twenty years. At the heart of Hugh's work is one core belief: art has the power to transform business. Art expresses ideas, vision, beliefs, culture and purpose faster, better and more deeply than any other method of business communication.

Founded in 2008 with business partner Jason Korman, Gapingvoid Ltd. has created custom art work for some of the largest, companies in the world, including Intel, HP, Microsoft, Roche, Zappos, VMWare and VW- and is hung in over 5,000 companies around the world. A special collection of MacLeod's art, arranged around themes of entrepreneurship, appeared during Art Basel 2013 here in Miami. 

Gapingvoid takes a unique approach to business communications. Including events, permanent corporate art installations, and outcome focused custom art implementation to help with behavior change in large organizations.

Art, particularly cartoons, are perfect for conveying the root of an idea in a way that starts dialogue between the right people. MacLeod harnesses this power of art in a way that helps businesses confront tough problems, parses complex human relationships and engages employees to collaborate on solutions together.

Mission, purpose and meaning are the cornerstones of the message behind his art.

MacLeod is a highly-regarded author, writing on the themes of innovation, creativity and motivation. His book "Ignore Everybody" began life on his popular marketing blog, gapingvoid.com, as an e-book.

It was downloaded over 5 million times since being posted and enjoyed by readers all over the world. Re-imagined in print form, the book "Ignore Everybody" made the Wall Street Journal's best sellers list. His follow-up book, "Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination" was equally well-received and hailed by Seth Godin as a must-read.

Noury Bernard-Hasan is the Head of Corporate Analyst Relations at Amazon. A few weeks ago I was excited and pleased to interview my old boss.

We talked about his 16 year Microsoft career as Director, Global Analyst Relations and his recent switch to Amazon, as well as his music career with The Touch - 70s Mod group We also talked about my prediction for a new Amazon 'Phoenix' Phone, the future of Alexa and his upcoming revival gig in London.

Tara Hunt is the founder and CEO of Truly.  We briefly chatted last week about her amazingly insightful video series on LinkedIn and YouTube. 

We also previewed Tara's forthcoming interview on my radio show - Play It Again Sam - Live 5th July.  

Background:

Tara Hunt has over 19 years experience in market research and strategy on both client and agency side. She is an author of one of the first books published internationally on how the social web is changing marketing [The Whuffie Factor: 2009].

She's been quoted in dozens books and articles, spoken at over 150 conferences, was named one of 2013's Entrepreneurial Women to Watch by Entrepreneur Magazine, and one of the Most Influential Women in Technology in Fast Company.

She not only talks the talk of building community and creating content online, she also walks the walk. She is a LinkedIN Influencer, followed by almost 200,000 people.

Her Slideshare presentations have been viewed over 2.5 million times. She is in the top 5% of Twitter users worldwide with over 52,000 followers.

She is one of the most respected and cited thought leaders in audience development — how to understand the audience, what delights them, what they will respond to, and where/when/how to reach them.

She combines a data-centric with a human-centric approach to building an audience, leaning heavily on insights into consumer patterns and behaviours while keeping an eye on online trends and changing expectations.

James Poulter is the founder and CEO of Vixen Labs.  We met briefly at his Voice London meetup. We briefly chatted about the events he helps coordinate and his new voice first agency called Vixen Labs. 

James will be a guest on my radio show - Sam Talks Technology - 17th July.  

Background:

James Poulter (most people know him as JP) is the founder of Voice2, the UK's leading Voice and Conversational Ai Community.

James has spearheaded a number of international conversational products including the first Alexa Skills and Google Actions, as well as the award winning chat bots programmes at The LEGO Group in his previous role as Head of The LEGO Group's Emerging Platforms & Partnerships.

James has a decade of experience in audio production and podcasting within agencies, independent projects and commercial ventures and has a passion for the power of the spoken word and the audio medium to create empathy, drive brand awareness and create immersive experiences.

James also acts a Programme Director for the world's premier conference on Voice Technology - Voice Summit.

 

Robert Scoble is the Chief Strategy Officer at InfiniteRetina which is a full-service agency that exists to help companies enter and succeed in Spatial Computing.  

We talked about "What is Spatial Computing?" We also talked about Facebook's new PC-free Oculus Quest (£499) and the higher end Oculus Rift S which came out today and what are the implications of this next generation VR now it's untethered and affordable.  

We also discussed the new Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 (which costs £999) it's a newer version of its business-focused Glass augmented reality headset.

Robert also gave us his insight about what and when Apple might release the 5G iPhone and possibly Apple AR glasses?

Other companies we discussed include Amazon, MagicLeap, Bose and Unity.

 

Few Links Mentioned:  

https://infiniteretina.com/

https://www.oculus.com

https://www.bynorth.com/

https://www.blog.google/products/hardware/glass-enterprise-edition-2/

https://www.bose.co.uk/en_gb/products/frames/bose-frames-alto.html

https://www.magicleap.com/

https://unity.com/

https://aws.amazon.com/sumerian/

Founder and CTO NewSignature  We talked about what is the cloud, how it has evolved and how the 'cloud wars' started between Google, Amazon & Microsoft and who might win. 

Background:

Dan is CTO of our UK operations and Founder of Dot Net Solutions, the Microsoft's FY15 UK Country Partner of the Year. Dan works very closely with the Microsoft account teams, serves as a mentor for Microsoft Ventures and is one of only three Brits currently sitting on the global Microsoft Azure Partner Advisory Council and Partner Engagement Board. Dan is also president of IAMCP UK.

Dan is a renowned Microsoft Cloud evangelist and often presents at conferences and events around the world about the advantages Cloud can bring to organisations. He is co-author of the book 'Delivering Solutions on the Windows Azure Platform? Ask the Smart Questions'.

Dan is an avid technologist and entrepreneur. In his role at New Signature he leads technical strategy, product innovation and heads up the presales and evangelism teams.

CEO of MetaCert. We talked about how Metacert provides real-time protection against phishing attacks in email clients, chatbots, web browsers and for all your social media accounts. i.e how they check the url links for malware or phishing, so you know the link you are about to click is safe and can be trusted. We see a world where people aren't afraid of opening the wrong link! - Paul Walsh Phishing Backgrounder: ---

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Building Future Protocols: ---

MetaCert is also building a future web protocol that offers a 'Decentralized Trust and Reputation Protocol' for the Internet.

Metacert aims to build a query and response protocol on the Blockchain, which stores open-sourced and community verified information on resources such as domain names, IP addresses, social media accounts, bots, applications, crypto wallet addresses, or autonomous system identities. e.g imagine being able to look up the record for every domain and see who has owned it and what it was used for.

Think of this as a distributed and trusted newer version of WhoIs Domain Lookup but with more detailed information, that is validated by the community who are paid in 'Tokens' to ensure its validity and maintained over time.

Then in the future, the information stored on the MetaCert Protocol can be used by developers to build products or services to address issues such as phishing, malware, brand protection, child safety, and fake news credibility.

By doing so, MetaCert wants to categorize different sources of the internet into reputable/non-reputable sources.

 

COO of Connected Kerb. We talked about the future of your street.  From Electric Vehicle (EV) charging points for cars, bikes & buses to the future rollout, potential benefits but also the current limits of 5G today. The biggest talking point was around the terabytes of data collection this enables and how AI will be used to build smarter cities that flow and are less polluted. 

Paul also talked about his days as European MD of Netscape (he was my boss) and the 'browser wars' as well as his time as GM Europe of Real Media and the early days of video streaming which led us to discuss the current 'content wars' between Amazon Prime, Netflix and the recently announced Apple TV +  

Co-founder of TechFugees. We talked about how he has used technology to "empower the displaced" and co-founder of Tech For UK about how he has used numerous technology apps to help people connect with their MP's, in order to stop Brexit.  We also discussed his latest project the Benefactory Club which is helping entrepreneurs build the organisations of the future. These organisations not only need to focus on the financial aspects of their company but the social culture of the organisation and their long-term enviromental impact. #capitalism2.0

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshr