It’s rather unsettling when foreigners know more about your city than you do. Once, a Nevis-based diving instructor recommended a plain-looking Vietnamese place at the top of my road, which later became a regular haunt.

Last week, several international speakers were discussing Tech City London aka Silicon Roundabout at Startup Croatia. I must have been the only person in Zagreb who had to find out what’s happening in East London through Wikipedia.

Yet, life’s connections are equally serendipitous. Last month I wrote about travel innovations. This month it’s all about retail technology. I subbed a thesis on how best to implement an omni-channel (a model in which socially connected consumers are able to interact with, and buy from, all channels and touch points in real time) strategy; met up with a retail technology investor and met a founder of another retail technology company (which produces software that measures offline analytics in real time).

One of the speakers at Startup Croatia discussed other retail innovations – think graphene (a carbon material which is one million times thinner than paper), ultracapacitors (some of the best devices for delivering a quick surge of energy, apparently) and nanowires that can be woven into our clothes; and a friend got in touch looking for a project manager for a London-based event… So it has been a week of introducing people and discovering lots.

Meanwhile, during a wet afternoon back in the office I received a text from Hot Danish suggesting plans for the evening, ‘Shall we order a takeaway and watch a movie? And maybe some… A’
‘Arse?’
‘S, shit’
‘Shitting? I’m really not into those kind of things, sorry’.

Technological innovations may now be bringing the world to our fingertips, but sometimes we still hit the wrong key (as HD amusingly demonstrated)…