Economical summit

[Dave Birch] I’m very proud to say that the Digital Money Forum has become an associate of Economist Conferences and we’ve been helping them to put together The Digital Money Summit at The Dorchester in London on 25th November 2008. The folks there have kindly invited a number of Forum friends — including Sandra Alzetta, Jack Selby, Susie Lonie and Diane Coyle — to come along and address a business audience on the state of the digital money marketplace now that more and more consumers are experiencing new ways to pay.

Naturally, there are some obvious areas for them to focus on: The arrival of contactless and mobile payments in the mainstream and the potential for the two them to transform retail payments through the magic of NFC. They’ve asked me to present a reasonably strategic overview of the topic to kick the conference off and I’ve started to put together a few ideas (based on the Digital Money 3.0 discussion we had before). The conference will chaired by Tom Standage of The Economist. You may remember that we gave out a copy of Tom’s excellent book the Victorian Internet to delegates at the Forum a few years ago so it will be real pleasure to meet him and learn from his perspective.

We’re hoping it will become an annual cycle, with the 2-day Digital Money Forum that you know and love in the spring and the 1-day Digital Money Summit targeting a narrower selection of content at a wider business audience in the autumn. I look forward to seeing you there in November and getting your feedback on how we can work most effectively with the Economist guys in the future to deliver a great service to the digital money community.

To cement the relationship between the Digital Money Forum and the Economist Intelligence Unit, those magnificent human beings at Economist Conferences have given me a complimentary delegate pass for this event — worth SEVEN HUNDRED AND NINETY FIVE BRITISH POUNDS plus VAT of course — to give away on this blog as a competition prize. So if you are going to be London on 25th November 2008 and you’d like to come along to hear some key speakers (and me) talking about digital money, all you need to do is to be the first person to respond to this thread with the name of the leader of the rioting mob that attempted to burn down the Bank of England in 1780.

In the traditional fashion, this competition is open to all except for employees of Consult Hyperion and members of my immediate family, is void where prohibited and made from 100% recycled electrons. The prize must be claimed within one month. Oh, and no-one can win more than one of the Digital Money Blog prizes per calendar.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]