Glastonbury and The Ting Tings clean up at UK Festival Awards

On an evening, which coincided with AEG Live packing up and moving from Canary Wharf to new offices in London Bridge, the girls took time out from tipping the contents of their desks into crates to attend the UK Festival Awards.

A big thank you to Emma Reynolds for inviting me to join them for an awards ceremony, which saw Glastonbury and The Ting Tings scoop a hat-trick of accolades each.

The awards, organised by Virtual Festivals took place at AEG's Indigo2. Within the plush surroundings of a live music venue that, this year alone has hosted everyone from Gary Numan to the Brand New Heavies (with Shakin' Stevens and the Bootleg Beatles still to come before the year is through), the great, the good and the crusty of the festival scene gathered.

They drank jagermeister, ignored some unknown compère whose day-job is at BBC 6 Music, swapped stories of mud and chemical toilets and stood only to applaud Michael Eavis before booing his suggestion that Jay Z should return next year.

Some 55,000 people voted for the winners of these awards. The 2008 hall of fame is as follows:

Best Major - Glastonbury Festival
Best Medium - Lovebox Weekender
Best Small - Secret Garden Party
Best Dance Festival - Glade Festival
Best Line-up - T In The Park
Best New - Camp Bestival
Grass Roots - Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival
Family Festival - Larmer Tree Festival
The Greener Festival Award - Waveform Festival
Best Toilets - The Big Chill
Yourope Award for Best European Festival - Oxegen
Best Headline Act - Kings Of Leon
Festival Rock Act - Biffy Clyro
Festival Dance Act - The Prodigy
Festival Pop Act - The Ting Tings
Festival Feel-Good Act - The Mighty Boosh
Best Urban Act - Dizzee Rascal
Best Newcomer - The Ting Tings
Anthem Of The Summer - The Ting Tings – 'That's Not My Name'
Innovation Award - Standon Calling: Hosted the UK's first festival underwater dance arena in a swimming pool
Most Memorable Moment - Jay-Z mocks Noel Gallagher with a rendition of Oasis' 'Wonderwall' at Glastonbury
Outstanding Contribution To Festival Award - Michael Eavis

Visit London's award winning website

Congratulations to the Visit London digital and business tourism teams. The website I'm contributing editor for won Gold at last night's Meetings Industry Marketing Awards for Best website. For this and other event stories, check out the now award winning visitlondon.com/business or see below for details.

Visit London's business tourism website has scooped Gold at the 2008 Meetings Industry Marketing Awards.

Beating stiff competition from the Brewery, Henley Business School and Mango Event Management, visitlondon.com/business won the coveted MIMA at a ceremony, held last night at the five-star Landmark London hotel.

The website won the MIMA following its re-launch as the official event planner's digital portal for London in April 2008.

The site was re-designed to offer an advanced venues and services search, improved and enhanced supplier listings, a three-way proposal submitting process, a call-back request, an enhanced planning toolkit with downloadable resources, industry news and a London events calendar.

In the two months after its launch, the number of unique visits rose by 17% to 12,723 and the number of page views rose by 20% to 45,656.

Visit London Business Marketing Manager Severine Ougier said: "This is great recognition by the meetings and events industry for the hard work of the Visit London digital and business tourism teams. In re-launching the website back in April we wanted to ensure event planners had all the right information and tools to find out more about our city, and ultimately choose London.
"We surveyed hundreds of international and domestic event organisers, consulted key suppliers and industry partners, and benchmarked main competitor websites to really understand what a destination website should provide."

Europe's event offer & trouble in Turin

Last week I was invited to Turin to judge the European Best Event Awards. Organised by Italian publishing company ADC, this set of awards brings together agencies from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, England and Eastern Europe to compete for a string of event accolades.

There are very noticeable cultural differences in the way each country organises its events. Outside the UK, creative content and the spectacle of performance out-weighs the need for return on investment. The results are often spectacular and over-the-top but the European events arena is a hot-bed of creative ideas. UK agencies should take these awards seriously, for inspiration if nothing more.

I of course, can’t divulge who the winners are as yet but, come November this blog will be the only place to find out which European agencies should be tracked and which one country in particular UK agencies should be aware of for its rapidly growing and innovative events scene.

In the meantime, a quick story that occurred during the two-day judging. An Italian experiential agency sent fake Rolex watches to every member of the jury panel judging the Italian-only categories. Many of the judges sent the watches back not realising that instead of a bribe, it was in fact a promotional campaign. Some however accepted the fake watches, realising the nature of the activity (I can only assume).

On the first evening of the two-day judging session, two agency representatives turned up to the Hotel Principi di Piemonte and staged a demonstration outside. They announced via megaphone that the awards were fixed and that judges had taken bribes. Members of the ADC organising team franticly tried to defend the integrity of the awards and make the protestors stop. Fortunately, they eventually saw the funny-side when they realised what was really happening.

It reminded me of the campaign to promote the second series of Dexter on FX by Portuguese agency Torke. A team of street actors caused international outrage (especially from the UK tabloids) when they played dead on the sidewalks of Lisbon covered in blood with knives protruding from their backs. Irresponsible or a creative idea to die for?

2020 vision

The November issue of Stuff magazine is out now. It includes my 2020 article on the future of gadgets and technology in communication, the home, fitness, transport, lifestyle, computers, gaming and the rise of robots. Thanks guys for some cool layouts, illustrations and so much space on the flatplan (nine pages!).

My brief was to track down real possibilities as opposed to fantasy flying cars etc. It was a lot of fun to research and put me in touch with designers and inventors from Tokyo to San Francisco, offering ideas ranging from the obscure to the brilliant.

Karl Kempf, an Academy Award winner for his work with the special effects team that made Superman fly in the first three original movies, talked to me about the future of film. John Sosoka, head of tech innovation at the robotics company best known for the Pleo - a robot dinosaur capable of emotional response and life-like human interaction, answered my questions on the future of robotics.

Due to copyright restrictions, you'll need to duck into a local WH Smith's and pick up a copy in order to see my published predictions for what the world could look like in the year 2020. But my research went beyond what was required by the magazine. So here are three of the concepts that you won't find in this month's Stuff (my very own DVD Extras!):

The Origami DVD Player
The screen uses the paper folding technique to expand and collapse automatically as the device is opened and closed. The concept addresses the need for larger displays without sacrificing the small form factor.

Daylight Window
Philips’s bedroom window won’t wake you up with a cup of tea but it will filter daylight through your own personalised window display. It’s like a visual snooze button, waking you up gently as the patterned animation disperses, allowing more light into the room. The window’s alcove provides blue-light therapy to ease jet-lag so the concept is most likely to debut in hotel rooms.

Madeleine Time Machine
Designer Charles Blanca believes that the closest we'll get to travelling through time in the future will be via sensory experiences. His time machine, Madeleine offers to help us find the smells we have lost because of the evolution of our living environment. In other words it'll transport us back to the school dinner table, grandma's moth balled wardrobe or any number of other places we'd rather forget.