My colleague, Romana, and I went to the DigitalDNA in Belfast, the event was within St. Georges Market – a place awarded the best large indoor market in Belfast but for DigitalDNA the space was transformed from a market to an exhibition for businesses and those working in the world of digital.
The DigitalDNA event is about local tech communities and ecosystems connected to the world and it’s all about where our future begins. Different companies from across Northern Ireland, Ireland and beyond delivered presentations about how innovations have changed our world and how digital will bring about further change in the next upcoming years. I had the opportunity at Digital DNA to test VR-glasses to learn about firms and about the tech hub.
The tickets that my colleague, fellow Erasmus trainee Romana and I used, were kindly gifted by Young Enterprise Northern Ireland. This was one of the companies exhibiting at the Digital DNA conference.Young Enterprise NI is the leading Enterprise Education Charity in Northern Ireland. They work with young people from the age of 5 till the age of 25 and help them to develop their soft skills and become young enterprisers.
My Erasmus Trainer Christine Watson completed the Young Enterprise Company programme when she was at high school – she, with fellow students, created a company by selling shares initially, her Young Enterprise company made and sold CD racks to the public and at the end of the programme returned shares, with profit, to the initial shareholders.
I met a very kind entrepreneur from GCDTech called Melissa – she is pictured the middle of the picture. Her firm helps other entrepreneurs to build their digital future with custom, beautifully designed software products and platforms to deliver more business value and to get a greater user experience.
Another company that I visited was Lewis Silkin – it is an international tech firm which develops start-up programmes for other companies, founders and investors all around the world at every stage of the start-up cycle. It navigates their strategic HR and legal issues as well. They help small businesses to become big businesses and for some of their clients the programmes are even for free.
At the booth of Aflac, I played a game where I had to drive a metal circle along a metal pole (but I wasn´t supposed to touch the pole at all) – I won a coffee-to-go cup for my efforts.
I also met a nice guy named Brian. Brian Douglas founded Coding Fury Ltd with the aim of helping the corporate world to utilise new and emerging technologies to their full potential. As a business leader, he has identified data science as the current key development area for the vast majority of organisations. He is a trainer and by way of follow up marketing I plan to email him to ask if he would like to avail of a Trainer profile on the platform Trainingmatchmaker.com.
Christine Watson