Paul Henderson

Last week I went to the West Midlands ICT Cluster 2009 ICT Conference. I was purely a punter so it was interesting to go along and experience an event aimed fairly and squarely at small and medium sized IT businesses. The shocker was that compared to a lot of Third Sector/charity/public sector events was the lack of social media around the event.  It was a very traditional (and smoothly run) conference, packed with plenty of tech – for example scannable badges for the workshop attendance and capturing details at the  exhibition areas.

It did fall down in a few places, just simple things like a lack of delegate list and no facilitated networking which means a room full of about 150 suits meant it was difficult to get much out of them. The workshops also were very unworkshoppy (at least the two  I attended) and not very interactive. But the most surprising thing especially being an I(C)T conference was the almost total lack of social media. Twitter was only mentioned during one of the keynotes by Chameleon Net MD Vicky Reeves (I now get the link to someone I have followed for ages on Twitter – Ross Miles) and once at the end by IBM megabrain Clive Harris. There wasn’t a hashtag and I’m pretty sure I was the only one tweeting away. It’s not just about Twitter though, there were some pretty special video cameras setup up, but no streaming of the talks (perhaps they were recorded), and no sense of this being part of a bigger community able to engage before, during and after the event. There are some pictures now appearing on Flickr. Indeed there was the slightly strange sight of one of the facilitators running  round the room so that he he could collect the business cards of delegates, apparently so that he could email the presentations (one at a time because they would be ‘quite big’) to everyone after the event.  Hmm Slideshare might be a fractionally more elegant solution there…

This wasn’t meant to be an event review but the take-home message for me (if I weren’t involved in it already) was that for small/medium businesses ICT has little or nothing to do with social media, which is a shame as I think that there is a level of inevitability of the impact of social media in most areas of life (especially as Clive Harris noted, through mobile devices), and therefore business especially for small and start-up organisations.

One presentation and product I did really enjoy finding out about was Sharedband, a UK/US start-up that enables businesses to combine two or more DSL or cable (even WiMax) connections to gain faster up and download speeds and greater bandwidth without having to take on the hideous expense of a leased line. It also provides redundancy too, making it a good option for a resilient business continuity plan. Most interestingly of all from my perspective, was something they are exploring by sharing residential  broadband connections via wifi – potentially helping out areas where people can’t get a good connection, clubbing together with neighbours to beef up their online options.  CEO Paul Evans talked to me about it in the clip below.

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