Dublin-based marketing agency and event organizer, ditto, boasts a full calendar of online events and webinars, and TechCity Connect was its most ambitious undertaking yet. With 12 tracks, including regulation, remote working, digital transformation, and smart cities, the event welcomed 2,500 attendees and 42 speakers for a full day of insightful discussions.
The Big Data & Ethics session brought together some of the foremost business leaders in the data analytics space, including data philosopher Charles Radclyffe as moderator, and speakers Gillian Doyle (CEO and Co-founder of debt recovery startup Cerebreon), Peter Lancos (CEO and Co-founder at data privacy startup eXate), and Richard Robinson (Chief Commercial Officer at marketing startup DPL).
Lancos was the first to take the floor after introductory comments from the moderator, sharing his thoughts on the challenges the data market is currently facing–prime among them the imbalance in data ownership caused by Big Tech firms like Google and Facebook.
“They have a lot of the data, and they’re preventing others from becoming data-driven organizations,” he noted.
Doyle offered insights from her work at Cerebreon, which uses data to predict insolvencies and recover debts. Education, she says, is one of the biggest missing factors when it comes to consumer data. In the insolvency arrangements, for example, users are presented with 70-page documents full of legal speak to sign away their financial information.
“Anybody who’s in financial distress is classed as vulnerable, and how do you ensure that people in a vulnerable state can actually make a decision to hand over their data?” she said.
While predominantly geared toward a British and E.U.-based audience for often touching upon specific aspects of European Commission regulations, the content of the webinar was packed with insights that applied to listeners around the globe.
After generating impressive traction for the first-ever TechCity Connect, ditto.tv CEO and Co-founder Mike Wilson says the event “exceeded all expectations on audience numbers, attendance, and quality.” The second edition of the conference, also to be held virtually, is scheduled for September 9, 2020. –NB
