Tag Archives: London

Our visit to Plexal, London’s latest innovation area

Business, Reviews,
"The Totem Pole" (real name) by the entrance to Plexal - impressive in reality
“The Totem Pole” (real name) by the entrance to Plexal – impressive in reality

Plexal is an innovation area based in part of the former Media Centre originally built for the London 2012 Olympics. This morning I went on a tour of the facility with a few colleagues from Endava.

The CEO of Plexal, Claire Cockerton, took us around. Claire founded Innovate Finance after working at Level39, the Fintech accelerator.

Plexal has been designed around the metaphor of an ‘Innovation High Street’. You walk in half way down the ‘High Street’. The reception desk transforms into a bar in the evening. The High Street has several glass fronted offices on the ground floor, intermittently separated by open desk areas acting as communal areas. Offices range from large (a couple of dozen desks) down to one-person pods the size of old public telephone boxes.

Communal areas also serve as fixed, large desks for organisations wishing to rent a permanent desk and leave a few monitors in place. There are coffee machines and kitchens dotted around, essential for start-ups. The whole place is designed and finished immaculately (the offices which are not still under construction). Once finished, it will cater for 800 people. At the moment it’s just over half full. Continue reading Our visit to Plexal, London’s latest innovation area →

The Goldman Sachs Headline event at London Technology Week 2015

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The Goldman Sachs Agenda at London Technology Week 2015
The Goldman Sachs Agenda at London Technology Week 2015

You may have seen some publicity recently how a megazillion people in the UK, especially London, all work in the FinTech sector. This publicity stems from some research commissioned by London Technology Week, a series of events taking place in London around FinTech.

The events range the full spectrum of FinTech technologies, and as a result we have clients travelling from the US over to London for LTW (London Technology Week). Most of the events are free, and even the charging ones were under £20.

I’ll be attending a few events with some colleagues going to events which clashed. I’m also speaking at Tuesday’s CSFI round table on crypto-currencies, which I think is just a coincidence that it happens to fall during LTW.

The first event of LTW15, or the headline event as it was known, was at Goldman Sachs called “Goldman Sachs Engineers – Solutions to Complex Problems at Scale”. Here are some brief notes. My apologies for speed over brevity – there will be a lot to cover this week.

Continue reading The Goldman Sachs Headline event at London Technology Week 2015 →