Digital Shoreditch #ds13

I spent some fun time at Digital Shoreditch today. It's running for a couple of weeks and has attracted plenty of sponsors, being only a phone's throw from 'Silicon Roundabout' just to the north of the City of London.

This area of London had a branding makeover and its official name is now 'Tech City', with most of the offices inhabited by digital startup companies.

Set in the old town hall, yet firmly facing the future, Digital Shoreditch is a good way to look across what is happening and to sift out the real stuff.

The discussions featured the telematics of life-streaming and explored the ways commerce intercepts the shared information. A kind of Moore's Law of rapidly expanding shared personal information. A trend until it bends.

At the core, the mobile phone is the personal device. Ages ago it replaced the cigarette for fidgeting, but then it grew eyes and ears, now it knows where we are, and what we are doing. No wonder it is the subject of innovative commercial attention.

Add the cheap commoditisation of GPS chips, so that constant location data for an individual and fixed location data for 'things' creates a basis for commercial linkages.

Unsurprisingly, beer-ordering fridges tower in the examples, at odds with the large groups who still won't trust online grocery ordering.

Of course, the organisations around the Silicon Roundabout are figuring out behavioural ways to make it all compelling, rather than the trickery of today's opt in/out tick boxes. Appeal to the head and the heart. Tell a story. Get interaction over content.

So Digital Shoreditch is waving its virtual flag for the Big Data/ Cloud based/ Visual Discovery/ Near Field/ Lifestreamed/ Always On environment.

Sure, it doesn't all work reliably yet (the recent near-field double-payments are an example), but it's clear that we can expect accelerating innovation from these methods of business.