Future Forward 08

The high tech world has plenty of events where techies and executives gather, from small, local gatherings such as Lunch 2.0 to big, international conferences such as the recent Web 2.0 Summit and the upcoming Le Web.  Most of these seem to be in California or Europe, but New England has a series of events all its own, produced by the team at Future Forward Events LLC,.  Last week, they produced the Future Forward Retreat which drew 135 local executives and entrepreneurs to Henderson House in Weston for a day of discussions ranging from what analysts predict for the future to the issues faced by the CIOs of the local sports franchises.

Some memorable quotes:

"All over-hyped technologies eventually become successful" - Josh Bernoff of Forrester talking about interactive television and mobile applications.

"There is nothing strategic about Game Day." - Pat Curley, CIO of the New England Patriots, describing how everything has to work when the fans show up, down to the machines that print the receipts.

All of the panel sessions were informative and interesting.  The most useful was one on customer acquisition.  The most fun was the demos.  More on those later. 

Thank you Alyssa Stern, Shayne Gilbert, and Scott Kirsner for putting on this fine event.