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I had the pleasure of presenting at Tech23 this week, which was quite an experience. Firstly, I would like to thank Rachel Slattery & her team at SlatteryIT for a truly professional event. In terms of quality of people presenting, on the panels & in the audience it was one of the best conferences I’ve attended – if not, the best. Getting that many people together can’t have been an easy task, especially without any glitches

From a personal point of view, I found the whole process of putting together five minutes extremely exhausting. It’s very hard to know what to put in & what to leave out, and there’s still so much more I would like to have said. The value of doing it in 5 minutes though, is exactly that you don’t have to say everything. It makes me wonder whether every presentation should last five minutes, giving your audience the chance to answer the questions important to them. Having Scott Farquhar, Martin Hosking & Emmanuel Rodriguez asking questions was far more valuable to the watching audience than listen to me prattle on.

So what of the other 22 presenting? I don’t remember a bad presentation at all, though of course you would expect that with the caliber of presenters. During the practice run the day before, I had the pleasure of watching Dr. Alex Brooks running through his pitch for Marathon Robotics. That put the chills up me, as his presentation was absolutely excellent – made me a little worried. After all, how can you compete with moving robots getting shot at! My concerns were unfounded though, as he rightly took out the top gong for Innovation Excellence & the People’s Choice. Great work Alex.

My other favourites included BiNu, Taggle, Solar-Gem, Aviator Controls & ReadCloud. All provide technology that can make a real difference to the world, which is a great place to be at. The Taggle presentation was pretty funny too, which tends to shine through at such events.