Encounters of the Tech Kind: TechXLR8

Here's part 2 of our regular series of blogs entitled 'Encounters of the Tech Kind'. This time we are talking all things techy after we attended the TechXLR8 event!

…as part of London Tech Week. Here’s Head of Client Services Flo’s take on what was fab and what was a bit drab!

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A few words about our expedition to TechXLR8 yesterday, I call it an expedition because it was at the ExCeL, and god know it’s not an easy place to get to! Right so that’s my first moan out of the way, onwards and upwards!

So for the positive:

1. We got to shake a robot’s hand. Badly. Twice.

2. The array of businesses out to sell and display their Tech goods was impressive, from cars that looked like modern versions of the Back to the Future DeLorean, to surgical tool, to drones looking like spiders, to (and this was our favourite) Virtual Reality CSI.

3. The Kainos start up area was buzzing and definitely the best area of the event in my opinion.

For the encouraging:

1. Met a smart city business consortium called citibrain: and was particularly impressed by their smart parking solution, for which I could really see a need in my local area in good old Brighton but would probably be useful everywhere. The encouraging bit is that this is a Portuguese business coming to London to do business despite the current difficult European climate, a brave move I thought.

The not so good:

1. The visitor pass doesn’t give you access to any of the talks. And I mean zero. We enquired about the price for the Cloud and DevOpps area and we were advised it was £799, that was just one area.
2. To enforce the above, talks in open spaces were formatted in a way that meant delegates were wearing headphones, to ensure visitor really could not participate at all. Whilst I understand the principle, it made the event rather quiet and low energy.

The verdict:

Would we go back? Perhaps not, chatting to a number of companies that had stands there, the footfall was on a the small side, and not there to do business.