Sam Talks Technology

Chris Ward is a former successful Serial Entrepreneur, Creative Director of Comic Relief and oversaw Red Nose Day '09 that managed to engage Britain and become the biggest single fundraiser in history, to raise £82m for good causes.

He was Director of 1GOAL, the campaign of the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa to create a legacy of education for all 75 million children still not in school. 18m supporters signed up and an additional £400m pledged by global Governments.

His first book was called "Out of Office - work where you like and achieve more".

Walid Al Saqqaf is the founder of InsureBlocks, a dedicated weekly podcast about blockchain, smart contracts and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the insurance industry.

Walid and I have known each other for over a decade. We first met when he was the co-founder of TrustedPlaces.

Daniel Appelquist is the Director for Web Advocacy at Samsung. He was also re-appointed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as co-chair of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) as an independent invited expert.

Ben Hammersley is a British internet technologist, journalist, author and one of the world's leading futurists, based in New York, USA. Ben is also known for being the inventor of the word "podcast", recalling that he made it up to pad out an article he was writing that was a little too short.

Coincidently Ben and I went to the same school - Loughborough Grammar School - but our paths never crossed, Ben is 10 years younger than me.

Ben talked about what he does as a futurist and hint it doesn’t involve a crystal ball. We also talked about a number of topics ranging from the future of technology through to the failure of politics and economics.

Unsurprisingly these topics are intertwined and symbiotic, resulting in Brexit, Trump and the rise of the populist movement aka the far-right.

We also talked about the trends Ben see’s coming down the track. For example the incessant cesspool of fakenews has caused a flight to paid quality content and the move away from the free ad-supported web.

Paywalls, such as the FT.com, were once very rare but today are very much in vogue. People now willingly paying for music and streaming services, however, this is also creating a two tier internet between the have's, who can afford to pay and the have not’s.

Ali Mitchell is a partner at EQT Ventures in San Francisco. EQT Ventures recently raised its second fund, bringing total funds under management up to €1.2bn

Founded just three years ago, EQT Ventures is very much the new kid on the venture capital block. Despite its young age the company is fast becoming a household name in Europe and it’s now got even more money to throw at what it thinks will be the next big thing in tech.

The Stockholm-headquartered venture capital fund has raised a new €660m fund, which is one of the largest venture capital funds in Europe. In total EQT Ventures has raised just over €1.2bn.

Ralph Cochrane is an award-winning video producer and the CEO of The Creative Grid, a cloud-based video production network, creating online content for many of the world's top brands and events.

"I'm part of the "digital nomad" craze so I'll be heading back to Dubai and Oman at the weekend for filming and then editing with some diving thrown in. "

In the past year, he has filmed in Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, USA, Rwanda, Russia, China, The Middle East and across Europe.

Martin SFP Bryant is the founder and editor of Big Revolution. He writes a wonderful must-read daily newsletter and has recently started his own podcast. Martin Bryant was the former editor of The Next Web.

Ed Hodges is the CEO of HelloDone (formerly Dazzle.ai). Dazzle recently raised £2.3m from Telefonica and Finance Birmingham.

HelloDone is an automated messaging platform for Smart Cities that opens up automated conversations via messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Amazon Alexa and others for transport, home delivery and utility companies to make everyday tasks easier for their users.

Dazzle was a 2018 TechCrunch Top Pick and Gitex Supernova Category Finalist for Best International Startup 2018.

Prior to this Ed created the digital and mobile app strategies, digital capabilities and operating models for Banks (RBS, Lloyds, Vanquis Bank) and Retailers (Tesco). He also set up the European arm of InAuth.com which sold to AMEX.

Giles is the Chief Marketing Officer of ///What3Words.

What3words is the simplest way to talk about location. It's a global address system that names every 3m x 3m square in the world with a unique 3-word address.

For example ///undercuts.shifts.cement marks the exact entrance to Marlow FM studios.

People can use What3Words to find any normal address or to find a location that doesn't have an address such as a tent at festivals or to direct emergency services to the right place when you breakdown on the motorway.

What3words is already available in 40 languages and is also included in Mercedes cars (and others) as an alternative navigation system.

Today What3words now works with smart assistants like Alexa to make it easy to book an Uber just by giving Alexa the three-word location of your destination.

In the future, I can imagine What3words will also be used for augmented reality to plot the location of objects because GPS is not user friendly and not every object will have a postcode.

Oliver Wellington is a co-founder and CMO of Headliner.app which makes it easy to create social video.

Headliner is currently being used by over 10,000 Radio Producers, Podcasters, and Publishers to generate thousands of videos per week.

Headliner is the app I use for Sam Talks Technology.