I’ve attended trade shows in Miami, Cannes, London, Brighton, Barcelona, San Francisco, Madrid and many less glamorous cities. Apart from getting pissed on free posh drink at (usually male-only) parties I can’t remember ever getting much out of them except the sight of men in suits trying to dance.

I’ve also sat on and presided over innumerable panels and while that does sometimes result in business and an increased network, it was still a grind. Furthermore, as a writer, contra-deal-maker or occasional journalist, I have never, EVER, paid to attend one.

That’s why I find it absolutely extraordinary that they’re so crap and so expensive. There are all sorts of reasons people go, get away from the wife/husband and kids, spend time in 4* spa hotels, but I suggest another way of spending that money.

Today I was invited to a Decoded course in Shoreditch to learn the rudiments of code and the joys of HTML, Javascipt and CSS. The course cost £600, rather less than more-than-one-day trade shows, and by the end of the day some decade-long questions had been answered and I had built a working geolocation app.

Amazing, and while it fried my brain and rendered me unable to go out on the London piss as planned, I achieved something. Granted, I’m unlikely to become a developer but at least I know Java and Javascript are completely different languages and it was all Netscape’s fault for the confusion.

So, marketing departments of the world, retrain your budgets. Redirect them away from cash-cow events that benefit the organisers more than the audience and spend it on training and courses.

As today’s experience proved, not only will your executives learn new things and be able to do better work, their livers will benefit and nobody will ever need to see drunk men dance in public again.

A. If you mean by ‘this; that the rules been rewritten and we are experiencing seismic change? Then, yes, it’s a new game and a new world. And as Steve Peters author of The Chimp Paradox and aide to the British Olympic team said: (i) Life is unfair (ii) They keep on moving the goalposts (iii) All we can do is try our best.

Q. What the hell sort of world is this anyway?

A. It’s fantastic and getting better. I can’t think of a single thing that isn’t getting better. We live in a world that is more creative and innovative than ever, a world where truly anything is possible. I’m quite old I suppose – don’t feel it – yet I’ve never seen so much opportunity or excitement. So next time you hear someone moaning hit them – for me.

Q. A good time to be a banker then?

A. No it’s a terrible time to be a banker. You’ll be regulated out of sight, derided and generally treated as you deserve (unlike artists who you’ll seek to patronise with your great wealth). Rather than data-driven businesses, this is a great time to be doing creative things.

Q. So what about marketing? Isn’t it just spin-doctoring by another name?

A. Marketing is about selling with wit, humour and style. It’s about identifying a need or desire, meeting it and packaging up the whole thing in a thrilling way. Like Selfridges does; like Apple does. It’s intellectually stimulating and thrilling to create brands– check out the OneDollarShaveClub to see what I mean.

Q. What are your worst marketing stories?…

Two bad stories are the Church of England that has wrecked a brilliant logo, great retail premises, a fantastic story with a great sales proposition through in-fighting over trivial issues. The Tesco story is (suddenly) pretty bad too – victims of their own certainty. The ubiquitous Tesco logo is something they’ll come to regret as their invasion of every High Street and back street is betrayed by an increasingly challenged product offering.

A. … and the best ones?

A. Ben & Jerry – quirky, funny and in love with their consumers. Apple – until now they’ve been magical. They treat marketing as though they were creating a thriller.

Q. Why did you write the book Brilliant Marketing?

A. Masochism apart…because writing’s a get-up-at-5am-business. I wrote the first edition in 2008 as an anthem to the thrill of seduction – well, that’s one way of looking at marketing. The idea was to write the definitive descriptive handbook about marketing and changing people’s minds.

Q. And what has most changed since you wrote version one?

A. When I was asked to write a second edition in 2011 I realised I was into a complete re-write because so much had changed. Social media had transformed the way marketers think and consumers behave. The cost of entry for new brands was radically reduced. Everything was new, improved or old and dying. Suddenly the world had become full of new things ….it was like living in the 1960s all over again. It was a world where selling was OK.

Q. Is quality improving?

A. Consumers are becoming smarter. A Gucci handbag looks great, makes you feel great and lasts forever. Generation Z are leaders in buying-less-and-buying-better. Cheap fashion falls apart, luxury fashion doesn’t. One glass of a £50 Balvenie Single Malt beats the hell out of three glasses of Asda own label.

Q. Any advice for a young entrepreneur?

A. Follow what Ralph Waldo Emerson told us – ‘create a luxury mousetrap that is really better, my son or daughter, and the customer will beat a pathway to your door’.

Q. So how can leaders or people like you create the future?

A. They/we can’t. The era of the old-fashioned/headmaster leader is dead although (unsurprisingly) most leaders don’t see this. Command and control is over. The future will be created by all of us, by a generation of innovators who don’t listen to authority and sometimes bash down doors just because they’re there. Marketing will be a leader in this reconstruction of the way we think if we attract the right talent. After all – who’d be in hedge funds and calculus instead?

Richard Hall blogs here and his book Brilliant Marketing: What the Best Marketers know do and say is available at all online stores

Earlier this week on Wednesday saw the 76th anniversary of the country’s annexation by Mussolini’s Italy… on the same day that the World Economic Forum on Africa opened in the country’s capital, Addis Ababa. It seems a propitious week to explore how things have changed for Africa’s second-most populous country.

Forget Live Aid and Peaches Geldof’s father’s noble efforts in the mid-1980s. Ethiopia is not starving, it is green and luch and amazing. Whether it’s the source of the Nile at the stunning Lake Tana, the buried churches of Lalibela or the town of runners where Olympic athletes train, this country is astonishing.

Travellers, and latterly tourists, have known this for years. Now, investors are following suit and the launch of a new $100 million private-equity fund on the same day as the Italian annexation in 1936 again seems karmic.

Schulze Global Investments is a US investment company and its fund is the first one focused exclusively on the country, supported by $15m from the UK’s CDC, a government-owned provider of development finance. It’s a family business that is based on its Wild West frontier history and one it appears will be based on the African frontier future.

This is a welcome change from the perception that Africa is all about lions, diamonds, war and, recently, mobile. But there are challenges in doing business in a country such as Ethiopia. At the country’s last ‘election’ the ruling party of Meles Zanawi won 99.6% of the votes and Ethiopia is avidly following the model of China’s state capitalism.

Still, the Chinese model isn’t exactly failing at the moment and investors don’t put $100 million into a private-equity fund without knowing the risks. Once the Chinese finally finish the moribund railway line to the Gulf of Aden and Ethiopia’s pesky border war with Eritrea (the Horn of Africa’s North Korea) is finished, that fund will be worth significantly more than $100 million.

I was in the country almost two years ago when I made the best decision of my travelling life to eschew a ticket to England’s game against Germany in the 2010 World Cup to spend three weeks travelling by bus through Ethiopia to Somaliland.

Something tells me that if I invest in this fund then in five years’ time I might be travelling again through Ethiopia. However, this time it will by helicopter, not bus, and I’ll be checking out my investments, not the mysteries of Harar and Rimbauld.

In the interim I suggest you change your holiday plans and check it out for yourself. Ethiopia is the best country in the world, you heard it here first.

What do you get when you cross classic strategy frameworks with a start-up? Paralysing indecision. This rather depressing conclusion came to me two years into my role as the COO of our company, a start-up that has been booming in the social media monitoring sector.

I was confident I could help frame and direct the company’s strategy, having spent six years as a strategic consultant at McKinsey and then four years with strategically minded jobs at Google and Ask.com (two companies with very different strategic needs).

Not only did I know all the strategic frameworks, but in my time as a consultant I had built up the almost unshakeable confidence that I could solve a problem quicker than anyone else.

This wasn’t just about our company. These type of strategic dilemmas are faced by most start-ups that have found themselves among the market-leaders in a high growth sector:

– Should you target a specific industry/company size or go all out?

– Should you offer people-intensive consulting services or just sell the company’s application and let them get on with it?

– Should your company work on launching a complementary product in an adjacent sector or ‘stick to your knitting’?

– Should your company expand internationally?

– Should you build an outbound sales team, or use marketing to lead your sales?

But here’s the difficulty. For every answer the classic strategy tools pointed to we had some strong data to suggest the opposite was true.

Let’s take international expansion and specifically our expansion into Brazil. Classic frameworks (such as VRI and Porter’s 5 forces) point out the expansion should work out but practical considerations suggest it could be too hard.

Hearing the pros and cons is like having to listen to two argumentative mates in the pub:

Jonny Frameworks (JF): Your company already has a lot of clients there already and a good and emerging reputation.

Practical Pete (PP): We’ll have to convert our online tool into Portuguese and multiple UIs will slow down future development.

JF: We have to cross the UI-bridge sometime and the competition is less intense in Brazil.

PP: But setting up in Brazil takes time and effort and we are resource-constrained.

JF: We could partner out there and save the set-up costs.

PP: But partnering also takes time and effort.

JF: We can hire someone to manage the partnership.

PP: But we have lots of other priority hires.

JF: But the ROI should…

Oh just SHUT UP! the pair of you.

The pattern was repeated for each of the strategic problems. Not to be entirely defeated, I decided to seek help, after all I couldn’t dedicate enough time to the problem as the day-to-day stuff was too time-consuming. I could not afford a Bain/BCG/McKinsey team to help me, so I decided to cheat.

I convinced the London Business School to use our company as a case study as part of the strategy module for the Sloan Masters course. The Sloan programme is impressive: more than 50 top-quality executives from all walks of life mostly self-funding their way through the well-structured Masters to hone their business skills.

But even here, the wisdom of (wise) crowds couldn’t crack it. Ten groups (with five people in each group) produced nine different answers to the questions. To be fair they lacked a lot of internal data that could have helped them reach a consensus, but, frighteningly, each of the reports made eminent sense when read on its own.

So what’s the solution? Well it turns out it isn’t to hire an ex-McKinsey strategy bod (I vote we send him to Brazil). Instead, we’ve put our faith in the original vision of the company, it is what attracted us in the first place and what has driven our considerable success to date.

So we ARE going to stick to our knitting and provide our customers with top quality social media data, excellent support and more automated tools to uncover insights, and we’re going to sell it to everyone (there’s more, but it is understandably under wraps for now).

And even if this does not turn out to be the perfect strategy, I agree with Jessica Spungin, the Strategy Lecturer for the Sloan Course, when she said, ‘an OK strategy executed brilliantly beats a perfect strategy started too late’.

At no time during this walk did I think how her pooh could be used to increase wi-fi access… at NO time.

However, in ten Mexico City parks, it IS being used to boost bandwidth courtesy of a new scheme from web provider Terra.

The company has connected litter bins to digitally metered scales so that every time aforesaid pooh is deposited so more free wi-fi minutes are granted to people at the parks.

Whoever is the creative behind this idea is a genius. She or he should be hired by the greatest agency in the land. Gags fail me, puns escape me but next time I take my dog for a walk I’m going to think just a little bit harder.

There is a significant gap in Europe for early stage funding for startups seeking less than £500,000. While new funds and incubators are starting to emerge, the lack of finance available is leaving European tech businesses at a disadvantage to their North American counterparts.

For many startups, bootstrapping a business is the only method of starting a company although this does have its advantages. Bootstrapped startups are more likely to have a more realistic business model and to be profitable early on.

This is in stark contrast to many venture-backed consumer web startups, many of whom are often dismissive of having a business model, let alone ambitions, to sustain themselves outside the VC funding bubble.

Enterprise SaaS companies are more likely to be bootstrapped at an early stage, with many investors preferring to back more fashionable consumer web startups – in particular those based around iOS apps.

While SaaS firms often receive less press and attention from investors they are demonstrating sustainable business models, with several US firms averaging around $60 million in recurring revenue recently (Jive Software, Eloqua, ServiceNow, Bazaarvoice) and achieving super-sized IPOs.

If European startups are to emulate this success they must avoid the all too often common temptation of an premature acquisition – usually by large companies in the US.

Despite the recent blockbuster acquisitions of Autonomy and Skype, there is still the potential for the next billion dollar company to be based in London – if they can avoid the temptation of early acquisition.

In a recent essay, Paul Graham of famed startup incubator YCombinator, made a call for the next generation of startups to have great ambitions and think big – replace email, destroy Hollywood.

Grand ambitions… however Graham also said that it was important to keep your grand ambition and long-term plan a secret from any investors for fear of them not buying in to the vision and coming along for a long-term ride.

This reflects one of the major issues with raising investment, and one which could prevent the emergence of a major independent technology company in the UK.

From the moment an initial term sheet is agreed there is a pressure from investors to make a return on their investment, and usually the quickest way of achieving this is through means of acquisition.

Many venture capitalists have a strong preference towards the consumer web, chasing the recent example of an Instagram-type exit that will cover the losses from all the ones that didn’t make it.

Enterprise software businesses are often shunned, not receiving as much interest, despite their generally more profitable models and sustainable recurring based revenue.

There is a trend among investors to back firms with hockey stick adoption rather than those who have a clear business model for monetization and profit.

This has partly created an ecosystem of firms whose only option is acquisition, as they are unable to sustain themselves outside of raising further funding rounds to sustain themselves.

As more of these venture funding sustained companies fail, those who have based their business models more around the bootstrap mindset will be able to survive on their own resources.

Conditions are becoming more and more favorable for significant technology businesses to emerge in the UK, particularly with the recent changes to the EIS and EMI funding schemes, along with R&D tax credits.

If the next billion dollar company is to emerge from the UK it will take a unique combination of excellent product, investor commitment to the long-term cause and strong leadership.

The idea of all that data being saved made many people more reticent when posting their 140 characters on Twitter. It seemed inconceivable that all that information could be stored, as much as 160 characters on SMS could similarly be saved via those operators that are as avuncular as Uncle Joe Stalin.

Two years on and it’s not weird at all. In that time the idea of our data being saved, or even owned, by a third party is commonplace. For those of us who are terrified of this present that we couldn’t dare contemplate two decades ago it is a living nightmare, for young people it’s no problem at all, they’re inured to it already.

Facebook’s Timeline is another channel where nobody really complained when previously hidden posts were suddenly made public. The same happened when Google’s rival to Dropbox, Google Drive, gave the advertiser, er I mean search engine, part-ownership of large files deposited that way.

So this week’s launch of a service called scrambls is to be welcomed. The simple idea is that using the scrambls plug-in users will be able to encrypt any post to Twitter, Facebook or indeed any website.

It means that Facebook can’t steal your content, all it sees (for now) are meaningless hieroglyphs, people can have private conversations again and the Library of Congress won’t know what you’re saying. There is also a SDK that means it can be integrated into third-party apps.

There are naturally a lot of questions here for individuals and companies who use it, what will it do to search rankings and how social indices such as Klout and PeerIndex will become less relevant. But something stops me installing the plug-in.

Why should this be if I am welcoming it? Well, it’s obvious, I’m so paranoid now about anything that the digital universe says is good for me and makes my life easier that I think scrambls is like the a niche Library of Congress, they still have control of me.

Perhaps a better strategy is not to give a toss. Why worry about what you say, how you’re perceived and who’s listening and chronicling you? Wasn’t it all about free speech in the first place?

As the video content implies, it’s the nuts…

Some tweets reported a bombscare evacuation, some said a man was holding hostages in Starbucks. In fact a disgruntled man had entered the office of Advantage HGV – a driver training company – to accost (and presumably threaten) one specific woman.

Witnesses said he had gas canisters strapped to himself and pictures quickly emerged of smashed windows and papers being thrown out of windows. Michael Green had reportedly forced his hostages to throw things out of the windows. He was protesting at his failure to gain a HGV driving licence.

Initially Twitter was the source for the news but once the big boys of news got on the scene, Twitter became the place to discuss the news. It went from informer to analyser and then to confuser.

While many tweets used the hashtag #tcr, many other people made glaring hashtag errors, typing things like “#tottenham court road” or “#tottenham #court #road” in their tweets. Thus, the story took on a new dimension as thousands of people then thought the story was about something happening in Tottenham, which is not where Tottenham Court Road is.

By the time Americans had woken up and started following the trending topics, they were reporting en masse about a bombscare in Tottenham.

Twitter is perhaps the greatest thing to happen to global news since CNN reported from the war in Kuwait in the early 90s, but Twitter is also the greatest proponent of Chinese whispers, not to mention a great exponent of poor literacy skills. Percentage of people on twitter who don’t know the difference between licence and license? About 99% if Friday is anything to go by.