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Hello,  Well, this is a tricky blog post to write, but let's cut straight to it. After May 31st 2011, I will no longer be at EMC Consulting. I've decided that after 18 years of working, and 12 years at EMC Consulting (Conchango and OS Integration) that it's time for a bit of a rest! This company, its people and clients, have been a ...

The Fantastic Tavern returned two weeks ago (sorry for the delay in writing this but an adventure in Japan took presidence), reformatted and in a new location, The Leather Exchange. This time the food was so much better and didn’t run out and there was just enough beer and wine to last the evening. The community is growing – there are over 100 ...

Many months ago, a group of creatives came up with an idea for a creative ‘meeting of minds’ under the rather mystical name, The Fantastic Tavern. Like many good ideas, it sat dormant, waiting for the right moment to be realised. Later conversations touched on similar themes. At ReMIX UK, friends discussed if we could nurture a creative ...

Before the festive holiday kicked in I intended to design a Microsoft Surface Card Sorting application but time ran out without me getting much further than a brief conversation over a cuppa with some user experience colleagues and a few very rough and barely legible sketches of the application interface. To make sure I don’t ...

Friday 28th November saw the first of the Virgin Atlantic VJAM workshops to brainstorm ways to improve the travel experience for customers.  Conchango took the Microsoft Surface unit along and I played guardian and host of this device for most of the day.  The attendees included travel professionals, experts in social media and ...

At the Tesco wine fair the Microsoft Surface table turns from a bar in to a rich immersive experience for the wine enthusiasts to explore content though touch and natural gestures. The punters had their own take on the five Ss in tasting wine.  So as spit became swallow and their hand-eye coordination slowly declined over the day, you ...

During the Surface workout Isobel demonstrated the magic of Microsoft Surface.  The one feature of Microsoft Surface that Bel didn’t touch on was object recognition.  Yet object recognition is one of the features of Microsoft Surface that really excites me. The five cameras inside the unit can recognise objects placed on the ...

The report on the top 50 UK retailers customer services proposition is still in progress.  By progress I mean that all the criteria for evaluating their proposition has been recorded and I now need to review the findings to make some sense of it.   In the meantime as a light aperitif here's a preamble around the all-important Customer ...

(Quote from Richard Hamming an American Mathematician and the founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery) As an Experience Planner at Conchango an important part of my job is gathering insight, adding value to business by finding what has escaped the sight of others. Insight is a favourite word of mine and one that is often ...

Today is day 1 of the Retail Week Conference 2008.  I arrived in time for the breakfast briefing, sporting a Conchango t-shirt. My trim figure barely made a dent in the XL Conchango t-shirt leaving plenty of room for a couple of colleagues to squeeze in. After a much-needed caffeine injection and over-indulgence in fresh croissants I ...