As part of it’s sponsorship of the RBS Six Nations Accenture, a founder member of Sport for Business hosted an exciting Sport and Technology showcase at its Grand Canal Square headquarters on Thursday evening.
Martin Johnston and Keith Wood were the sporting guests of honour and regaled an audience of 100 staff and clients with stories of leadership, Lions and ‘that incident’ at Lansdowne Road.
Hailed as a moment of brilliant psychology or terrible disrespect, Johnston admitted last night that it was less planned than arising out of the fact the team were warming up at that end, had lost the toss and would be playing from that end, and that there was a small bit of stubbornness in that it was not the ref but a stadium official that had made the first request.
Judge for yourself and see the eventual outcome at the bottom of this story.
Preceding Johnston and Wood onto the Accenture stage was the company’s Chief Technology lead, Jack Ramsay. If ever you need a lesson on how the Corporate side of an event like this can work, fight to get an invite to hear Ramsay talk.
His delivery in a Scottish burr is disarming and effective but his insight into the world we will inhabit in the future, and the role that technology will play, will live long in the memory of those who were there.
As a sample here are some of the nuggets he delivered:
- 4.5 billion people in the world have a mobile phone. That’s 1 billion more than have a toothbrush.
- More people have access to the internet than to refrigeration.
- 30% of twitter account holders have an annual income in excess of €100,000.
- M-Commerce will make e-commerce seem totally irrelevant.
- Location based push messaging through smartphones has seen redemption figures as high as 16% with some retailers in pilot programmes.
- If the cloud were a country it would be the world’s fifth largest consumer of electricity.
- 3D Printing will change the world. As an example the James Bond Aston Martin that was blown up in the recent ‘Skyfall’ movie had been ‘printed’ and at least one Formula 1 team will this season be driving with a gear box that has been similarly ‘built’. If you don’t know about it, you need to.
See how Accenture is activating its sponsorship of the RBS Six Nations
See how Ulster Bank is activating its sponsorship of the RBS Six Nations
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