I’ve really been looking forward to this talk by Graham Whitehead, as I’ve never heard him speak, but he has an excellent reputation.

“Don’t think out of the box – think out of your lifetime”

Out of something over 100,000 staff, 77,000 can work from home (although they don’t do it all the time). This relates to a discussion that came up yesterday – why do universities seem to find it so difficult to grapple with home working (immediately it was mentioned yesterday people started saying things like ‘lots of issues’, ‘health and safety’…)

This is a great example of how a good presenter can make material really engaging. A lot of what Graham is saying is not new to me, but I just find his presentation engaging in a way that most of the other talks in this conference just haven’t been.

Graham is giving lots of examples of how ‘always on’ connectivity to the network will change things – cars will communicate with each other about journey times, traffic news, etc. TVs will schedule programmes for you, and by checking your calendar will know when to show it, and when to record it.

There are some issues with what he is saying – he admits some of this kind of thing will rely on great metadata – and my experience is that this is just not there at the moment – but perhaps this will come.

It’s great to hear about the future – and to realise how close some of this is. A great example of ‘video conferencing’ in Cisco – using huge screens to project lifesize avatars, savings millions of dollars in travel costs – they are actively stopping staff from travelling between sites.

Some interesting stuff on micropayments – I hadn’t seen about Visa Wave – coming to the UK this year.

Mentioning Energy problems – vision of oil prices reaching a peak in 2016 with travel becoming antisocial and prohibitively expensive – but other energy sources will come on stream.

Graham dotted through so many things here, I haven’t got them all down – but overwhelmingly the point came through that he believes that in the future everything will be connected all the time – sharing information and acting on it.

I’ve really been looking forward to this talk by Graham Whitehead, as I’ve never heard him speak, but he has an excellent reputation.

“Don’t think out of the box – think out of your lifetime”

Out of something over 100,000 staff, 77,000 can work from home (although they don’t do it all the time). This relates to a discussion that came up yesterday – why do universities seem to find it so difficult to grapple with home working (immediately it was mentioned yesterday people started saying things like ‘lots of issues’, ‘health and safety’…)

This is a great example of how a good presenter can make material really engaging. A lot of what Graham is saying is not new to me, but I just find his presentation engaging in a way that most of the other talks in this conference just haven’t been.

Graham is giving lots of examples of how ‘always on’ connectivity to the network will change things – cars will communicate with each other about journey times, traffic news, etc. TVs will schedule programmes for you, and by checking your calendar will know when to show it, and when to record it.

There are some issues with what he is saying – he admits some of this kind of thing will rely on great metadata – and my experience is that this is just not there at the moment – but perhaps this will come.

It’s great to hear about the future – and to realise how close some of this is. A great example of ‘video conferencing’ in Cisco – using huge screens to project lifesize avatars, savings millions of dollars in travel costs – they are actively stopping staff from travelling between sites.

Some interesting stuff on micropayments – I hadn’t seen about Visa Wave – coming to the UK this year.

Mentioning Energy problems – vision of oil prices reaching a peak in 2016 with travel becoming antisocial and prohibitively expensive – but other energy sources will come on stream.

Graham dotted through so many things here, I haven’t got them all down – but overwhelmingly the point came through that he believes that in the future everything will be connected all the time – sharing information and acting on it.