Affino’s Annual Innovation Briefing Event is taking place at the St. Pancras Meeting Rooms, Derbyshire House, St Chad’s St, London WC1H 8AG, UK. In the heart of the King’s Cross area of London, and not far from Coal Drops Yard and the two main stations. In fact just across and on the other side of the Marylebone Road [See Map]. King’s Cross St. Pancras Station is served by 5 Tube Lines - Circle, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan, Piccadilly, Northern and Victoria.

The Theme for this year...

Humanity Direct is Affino’s chosen and preferred Charity Partner, and 2020 - despite all its challenges, marks the 5 Year Anniversary of our collaboration. On such an auspicious occasion we felt this would be an ideal time to catch up with our Humanity Direct colleagues and review their ongoing mission and evolution and celebrate what we had achieved together.

These last few weeks have seen a lot of features about B-Reel’s excellent recent interactive touchscreen live sales assistant interface for Sweden’s 3 Mobile Phone Store. The new interface - aka ’3 LiveShop’ enables a sales assistant to present various options in the style of Tom Cruise in Minority Report. The touch screen interface allows the assistant to sweep and select with multiple touches and drag and drop pictures and text panels onto the interface. On the client ...

Alongside many Brits, I have been encouraged to sign up to Groupon so as I don’t miss out on some amazing deal or stupidly pay over the odds for an essential product or service. I am already signed up to more specific discount sites / services like BrandAlley (mostly Fashion / Accessories / Homeware), Toptable (Restaurants) and Lastminute (Hotels / Travel / Excursions / Entertainment).

I am signed up on Groupon for ’London’ - but London is an enormous place, and all the offers ...

I was at the magnificient Westfield Mall, Shepherd’s Bush last night - which really is a most excellent cathedral to that most highly disciplined vocation of holistic retail.

Of course I grabbed a map on the way in, but the A3-folded-in-four-format was not particularly good for easy navigation around the mall - largely as your perspective and orientation changes so much - looking up and navigating via old school map is a little more complex than it should be.

I immediately ...

Following on from my ’New Industrial Revolution’ article, which talks about everyone being able to design and manufacture their own industrial goods; i.e. the democratization of Manufacture; I now turn my focus to retail, where everyone can set up their own Boutique online.

Before I get into the definition of a Boutique, I would just like to reflect on a number of emerging trends, particularly in the area of fashion retail. In real-world shopping malls, some of you may have come ...

Most people are aware of Iceland’s recent plight of financial meltdown and volcanic erruptions. The Eyjafjallajökull (Ey-ya-fja-dilla-yehrk-uhddle) erruption though is currently more likely to bring to mind flight cancellations and deferred holiday plans - rather than the panorama of the stark ethereal beauty of mother nature. For Iceland is a land of continuous and immense geological upheaval, it is a land of fire and ice, of ancient Nordic gods, enduring Sagas and mysterious hidden...