At Fox Agency, we like to make sure we’re abreast of all the trends impacting the B2B technology market – it ensures we can do the best work for our clients and identify the businesses and brands we were made to work with.
With this in mind, I signed up to the IoT Tech Expo 2019, heading down to the Olympia Grand in London to find out about all the exciting new developments in enterprise technology and what they mean for tech and engineering businesses.
Blockchain – forget volatile cryptocurrencies
On arrival, it turned out the IoT Tech Expo was being hosted alongside the Blockchain, AI & Big Data and Cyber Security & Cloud Expos. That’s a whole host of cutting-edge tech discussion for your buck, but blockchain was by far the star of the show.
I met countless start-ups and niche operators offering blockchain services spanning a long list of markets, including insurance, utilities and energy. This is an exciting area, and one we’ll explore further in a full-length article very soon.
Aitrak – heatmaps made by machine
Heat mapping is great way to improve the accuracy and success of AB tests, but it takes time, which is why meeting the Airtrak team and learning about their work was so interesting.
The start-up has created a predictive machine learning model that’s been trained with thousands of retail eye tracking images. This understanding means it’s able to heatmap images in the course of seconds as opposed to days, achieving a 95-97% accuracy rate compared with traditional eye-tracking studies of the same images. It will be interesting to see what impact this will have on campaigns, and how brands will adapt to a significantly levelled creative playing field.
Speakers – exciting innovations, massive opportunity
During the day I spent at the event I caught a long list of speakers hailing from some of the UK’s biggest tech businesses. Some takeaways:
- IoT technologies have become totally embedded in manufacturing, industry and services – their use is the rule, not the exception.
- The security risks inherent in IoT tech are being seriously challenged using blockchain technology. But will it be enough to win over nervous adopters?
- The extent of Facebook’s use of AI is staggering – 200 trillion predictions covering face recognition, content generation, ad placement and fake account removal, every single day. It’s interesting to imagine how other industries could leverage this scale of number-crunching.
Meeting the experts
My favourite part of these events is meeting brands and businesses face to face, and it was great to talk to professionals in truly cutting-edge fields. As well as learning a great deal about developments across the mass of tech markets represented at the event, it was gratifying to hear the positive response from businesses when they heard about Fox Agency’s offering. Watch this space!
Want to learn more about how we leverage our passion for tech to build powerful campaigns? Contact the team today.