Two years ago, I attended Future Decoded – Microsoft’s largest UK event, which has taken place each November for the last few years at the ExCeL centre in London. It’s a great opportunity to keep up to date with the developments in the Microsoft stack, with separate Business-focused and Technical-focused days and some really good keynote speakers as well as quality breakout sessions.
Future Decoded has particular significance for me because it’s where I “met” risual, who have been headline sponsors for the last 3 events. After the 2014 event, I decided to find out more about risual and, in May 2015 I finally joined the “risual family”. This year I was lucky enough to be on one of our five stands (one headline stand in the form of a Shoreditch pub, complete with risuAle, and one each for our solutions businesses in retail, justice, education and productivity). I had a fantastic (if very tiring) day connecting with former colleagues, customers, industry contacts and potential new customers – as we chatted about how risual could help them on their digital transformation journey.
They are back with a bang. Come and take a look @risual. Returning in style #FutureDecoded. pic.twitter.com/WF6aSw7sre
— Microsoft Business (@MSFTBusinessUK) November 1, 2016
Whilst I wasn’t able to attend a lot of the sessions, indeed I was consulting with a customer in the north-east of England on the first day, I did manage to catch the day 2 keynote and was blown away with some of the developments around machine learning and artificial intelligence (maybe more on that in another post). I also noticed the teams behind the Microsoft Business (@MSFTBusinessUK) and Microsoft Developer (@MSDevUK) Twitter handles were tweeting sketch notes, which I thought might be a useful summary of the event:
Check out this great sketchnote wrap up of Day 1 #FutureDecoded https://t.co/klAfWXQf0i pic.twitter.com/UIqaHsgU7U
— Microsoft Business (@MSFTBusinessUK) November 2, 2016
The #risual office seems pretty quiet today after all the hustle and bustle of #FutureDecoded, so here’s some sketch notes; before and after pic.twitter.com/YAeN53nDE8
— Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) November 3, 2016
4000+ visitors, 19 keynotes, and a whopping 130 breakout sessions… That’s a wrap for Tech Day and another inspiring #FutureDecoded! pic.twitter.com/7zJZYTw7bu
— Microsoft Developer (@msdevUK) November 2, 2016
You can also catch all of the main announcements in these two Microsoft live blog posts from the event: