The Age Of Too Much information

Over the past two weeks we participated at the Digital Shoreditch Festival. From very humble beginnings in 2011, this year over 15,000 people registered to attend. Nearly 500 speakers and countless other meetups, demonstrations, and parties. A whole app was developed just to keep track of it all. Amongst others, I saw an awesome talk from Martin Hollywood entitled "UX Hacking or 'Banana Pianos and Beyond'".  I saw Brian Cooper speaking about the "Future of Storytelling", and my business partner, John Rowland, spoke on Wednesday on “How to get through a VC transaction." All fascinating, but, it was certainly hard work to keep up with it all. How many other great talks did I miss?

This comes just a month before the second annual London Tech Week  (June 15-21) which is even larger - 40,000 participants are expected, hundreds more speakers, at events in over 125 venues spread out across London.

London has a thriving tech community and it is important for all of us involved to get a chance to meet, share ideas and innovations, and celebrate success.  However, I wonder if we are not getting overwhelmed with too much information? The effort and energy required to filter and distill these huge events and integrate them into your company is often quite substantial. Most entrepreneurs I know are already giving 200% into their companies and given our industry is all about innovation maybe we should be looking at new models where we can still collaborate, share ideas, and party, but be able to make more efficient use of that most precious commodity - time, by filtering content that is relevant to our needs.

By Ashok Parekh, Director of Investment Services

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