Thoughts from Ewan Macleod, Digital Entrepreneur


The predictive capabilities of mobile phones will evolve. The next step would be “we’ve checked you into your hotel” or “we’ve ordered you more currency for your trip.”


Don’t dismiss injectables as too invasive. They’re coming.I can see a time where I would happily say “place an RFID chip inside my hand, so that I can walk straight through passport control.” I can see a future where the consumerisation of them reaches a point where it’s reliable, helpful and useful.


Nothing matters more than equipping delegates with excellent Wi-Fi. I’ve been consulting with MICE companies for years, and I think they’re beginning to get it. People might laugh at me if I said 100MB was an ideal speed for connection, but my opinion is that if you’re accessing everything on your phone, it should be instantaneous, especially in a business situation.


Thoughts from Mike Van der Vijver, Mindmeeting


The whole point of a meeting is to make people interact. Any technology introduced should not interfere with this. If you bring people together for a conference or meeting, you want to capitalise on the fact that the group’s brain power has increased by being together.


People need to do a lot more pre- planning to get meeting content right. Lectures are going to be an increasingly smaller part of MICE programmes. The strength of people getting together is not sitting there and passively listening to one guy speak – do I really need to be frisked at the airport for that? If that’s all you’re going to give me, I’d rather sit in a comfortable chair at home, with a nice glass of port, and watch this guy speak by streaming it online! Instead, once I’ve heard this guy’s input, I want to take what I’ve heard, talk about it and work together.


The power of authentic experiences is more important than pampering. People need to be taken care of, but if you connect everyday experiences to relevant content and frame them the right way – if you’ve got 40 people learning how to make tapas together, for example – we underestimate the power of that, the really subtle social pressure you have within groups, and how that emphasises what you take away with you.


Technology does a lot of things, but it can’t do essential things. There is this fear that the young generation is becoming binary in how they view relationships. But our biological needs are not going to change – Tinder is no different really from scanning the disco floor for nice girl! It’s the same with meetings, the essential bit will always be “do we trust each other?”


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