Digital revolution at the Residence

In the last few days we’ve had two events here in the residence on the theme of the digital revolution and how it’s changing our lives. First of all we had an event to celebrate innovation and technology and young talent applying itself to the problems we are facing.

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As part of that we had a number of distinguished speakers including the French minister for Digital innovation Fleur Pellerin. She made a point of describing how much effort the French government is putting onto la “French Tech”, and just like the British government, helping entrepreneurs and those with ideas to develop them.

Other speakers talked about the speed at which the digital world is evolving – not just in terms of new apps but also the physical infrastructure that is underpinning it, with the arrival of fibre optic cable for example and Wi-Fi hot spots more and more available in our towns and cities. Then again a third speaker talked about how the owners of digital content, like music, are having to adapt very rapidly to this revolution, to find new ways of delivering content to their customers and that live streaming is the latest in a series of innovations that are coming through.

We took on the theme of innovation in a digital world in a big conference we had here for French and British business people working on the “Internet of things” – that is the whole world of objects now connected to the internet and talking to each other. This has far reaching implications and we looked at the issue of cities – how life in the cities is going to be effected by this, for example for energy, and the fact that people can control much more closely how they use energy in their homes.

And in health, where the arrival of the digital world in terms of people being able to monitor their own health, not have to go to hospital, saving money on hospital beds, being able to be in touch in real time with medical professionals is again transforming the way healthcare is provided.

All of the details of these events can be found on our social networks, and this has been an example for me how this wonderful old setting we have here, can still be used to address and have discussions about the cutting issues of our times.