Tag : NESTA

Last week I attended an event at NESTA about the powers and possibilities of big data, where Hans Peter Brondmo (Head of Social Software at Nokia), Haakon Overli (Managing Partner of Dawn Capital), Max Jolly (Director of Media Solutions at dunnhumby) and Megan Smith (General Manager of google.org and Vice-President of New Business Development) spoke about issues such as privacy (Nokia), investing in big data (Dawn Capital), using data to transform the way a business works (dunnhumby works with Tesco on their Clubcard), and channelling data for social good (google.org).

This morning, Duncan and I went to ‘Serious Games’, a talk at NESTA about how games can create lasting change in fields such as education and collaborative problem solving. Mary Matthews from Blitz Games and Alex Fleetwood from Hide & Seek presented their views on the subject (in short, Mary’s central thesis was that all games should have a purpose, and that they should be part of a larger plan in order to create impact, and Alex spoke about the increasing prevalence of pointsification and badgification as distinct from the much-discussed concept of gamification; more about that on the Hide & Seek blog here).

The NESTA site already has an excellent collection of resources that were mentioned or discussed at the event, for those who are interested, so I’m not going to re-cap the event per se. I’d like to focus instead on a few key things that I got to thinking about afterwards: