On June 28th, I had the pleasure of joining colleagues, clients and friends in Berlin for Ketchum Pleon Germany’s “Inspiration Day” (#idberlin2012) a conference to explore how technology and the social mobile web are changing the way people and brands communicate. The event fittingly took place at the EUREF campus, a hip, post-industrial complex in the middle of Berlin where researchers and entrepreneurs are innovating to develop sustainable solutions, such as Urban-e’s rechargeable electric bikes, for more intelligent urban living.
Dirk Popp, the CEO of Ketchum Pleon Germany and the vision behind Inspiration Day, invited me to kick things off with the opening keynote presentation. He asked me to frame the day by talking about today’s “digital challenges” and the “next big things” we might expect to emerge from Silicon Valley and other global innovation hubs.
The speakers that followed included Bastian Unterberg, founder of Jovoto, a creative crowdsourcing platform that, in many ways, resembles Ketchum’s own Mindfire; Jens Garberding, from Microsoft’s Windows Mobile; Sven Scheffler, the former editor of Handelsblatt.com, Germany’s largest financial newspaper; Thomas Ross, from IBM Global Business Services; and Steve Nitzschner, co-founder of Hugleberry, a new startup in the sustainability space.
I had a great time mixing it up with the Inspiration Day crowd. The event lived up to its name: I came away inspired — by the crowd, the great lineup of interesting speakers, the exciting and lightening fast changes that are taking place in technology and communications, and by the bright future that lies ahead.
For more inspiration about technology and communications, watch this space for videos of Inspiration Day, coming soon.
