Every year – Pandemic permitting – Leeds Digital Festival becomes the biggest tech festival in Europe, bringing together some of the most innovative minds and businesses together, in the great city of Leeds. This year the festival runs right across the city from 18th to 29th September.
The listing of events has just been published on the website and there are some really interesting things happening.
Here are my highlights for Leeds Digital Festival 2023.
Founder F*ck Ups – Prolific North
Scars and stories from founders trying to find funding and grow their business.
Founders are too often given conflicting advice from those who’ve never actually grown a company. Growing a business is hard, the Founder Fuck Ups event series is about bringing us back to reality.
Hear from founders who’ve been there before and learned their lessons the hard way. More importantly, listen to what advice they wish they had beforehand.
Founder F*ck Ups – Prolific NorthAgile Yorkshire the Relaunch – NewRedo
After running almost every month for nearly ten years, Agile Yorkshire has been on a hiatus since shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown. Now it’s ready to relaunch!
They have an amazing speaker line up in Kieran Baker – Chief Digital and Information Head for South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board and Alan Raison – Principal Engineer for NewRedo. Between them, they have a smorgasbord of agile stories to tell, rooted in real world experience, from large scale delivery to the technicalities and economics of building developer environments efficiently, for effective and flexible delivery teams.
Agile Yorkshire the Relaunch – NewRedo
Is the Metaverse Dead? – Walker Morris LLP & BDO
The long-theorised concept of ‘the metaverse’ crashed in mainstream consciousness in 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand as Meta in a now infamous demonstration of a future virtual world where our digital avatar’s could play poker with robots on a spaceship whilst sharing IRL videos of their dogs.
Is the Metaverse Dead? – Walker Morris LLP & BDOLet’s Fast Forward to a Store Operations Revolution – BJSS
See how John Lewis is reinventing its physical stores and how Microsoft is transforming the retailer operations process using data and AI.
Whether you’re a seasoned retail professional, a tech enthusiast, or simply curious about what’s to come, this should be a fun evening of talks and learning to inspire you to drive transformative change and enrich customer experiences using technology.
Discover how innovations such as ChatGPT, computer vision, deep learning and senor fusion are paving the way for more efficient operations, while seamlessly personalising and optimising the shopping experience.
Let’s Fast Forward to a Store Operations Revolution – BJSSGet to the Point – The Marketing Optimist
Finally, I couldn’t miss off a plug for our own event at Leeds Digital Festival.
This year The Marketing Optimist is bringing back Get to the Point for its second year. Get to the Point is a night of PowerPoint presentations, where the speaker can talk on any topic they like, for 5 minutes. However, we introduce three specific rules, or restrictions, which make for a fun, fast paced and engaging format.
- 20 slides
- 15 seconds each slide, which change automatically on a timer
- NO SALES PITCHES
The event is on September 26th at Glean’s office space in Leeds Dock.
Get to the PointFind the Leeds Digital Festival event to suit you
These are the events that really interest me, but there is so much going on at the festival that there’s no way to summarise them all here. Take a look at the full line-up on the Leeds Digital Festival Website and explore all the juicy stuff for yourself.
I might even bump into you there!
