{"id":3509,"date":"2012-01-27T11:07:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3509"},"modified":"2012-01-30T17:09:49","modified_gmt":"2012-01-30T17:09:49","slug":"last-orders-at-the-fantastic-tavern-tftlondon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/01\/last-orders-at-the-fantastic-tavern-tftlondon.htm","title":{"rendered":"Last Orders at The Fantastic Tavern (#TFTLondon)"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a year ago, I wrote about a fantastic concept called The Fantastic Tavern (TFT)<\/a>, started by Matt Bagwell<\/a>\u00a0(@mattbagwell<\/a>) of EMC Consulting (ex-Conchango – where I also have some history). Since then I’ve been to a few more TFTs (and written about them here) and they’ve got bigger, and bigger. What was a few people in a pub is now a major logistical challenge and Matt’s decided to call it a day. But boy did it go out with a bang?!<\/p>\n

Last night’s TFT was at Ravensbourne<\/a>\u00a0(@RavensbourneUK<\/a>) – a fantastic mixture of education and business innovation hub on London’s Greenwich peninsula. I was blown away by what Chris Thompson and the team at Ravensbourne have achieved, so I’ll write about that another day. Suffice to say, I wish my university had worked like that…<\/p>\n

Last night’s topic was 2012 trends. Personally, I thought the Top Gear-style cool wall (“sooo last year, tepid, cool, sub-zero”) was way off the mark (in terms of placing the trends) but that doesn’t really matter – there were some great pitches from the Ravensbourne students and other invited speakers – more than I can do justice to in a single blog post so I’ll come back and edit this later as the presentations go online (assuming that they will!)<\/p>\n

The evening was introduced by\u00a0Mike Short, VP of Innovation and R&D at O2\/Telefonica who also sits on the board of governors at Ravensbourne and so is\u00a0intimately\u00a0involved in taking an\u00a0institution\u00a0with its rooms in Bromley College of Art (of David Bowie fame) from Chiselhurst to provide art, design, fashion, Internet and multimedia education on Greenwich\u00a0Peninsular, next to the most visited entertainment venue in the world (The O2 – or North Greenwich Arena). Mike spoke about O2’s plans for an new business incubator project that O2 is bringing to London in the next 3 months as O2 looks at taking the world’s 6bn mobile device subscribers (not just phones, but broadband, payment systems, etc.) to connect education, healthcare, transport and more. In an industry that’s barely 25 years old, by the end of the year there will be more devices than people (the UK passed this point in 2006) and the market is expected to grow to more than 20bn customers by 2020.<\/p>\n

Matt then spoke about the omni-channel world in which we live (beyond multi-channel) – simultaneously interacting on all channels and fuelling a desire “to do things faster”.<\/p>\n

Moving on to the 2012 trends, we saw:<\/p>\n