The Inspire Conference, but was it inspiring?

It seems everyone who organises anything these days must also put on the obligatory conference which is "the" conference to go to.

On June 7th and 8th at the organisers of Launch48 put on the Inspire Conference at UCL's Senate House in the centre of London. Even if the conference failed, Senate House is one of the most inspiring buildings in London, it doesn't quite fit, looking more like something out of a US skyline.

The conference was located on the ground floor with the exhibition in the main hall and coffee/lunch opposite with WiFi (supplied by UCL) present everywhere (the WiFi required a login, but remained available even at peak usage with no drop-outs or reduced bandwidth - other venues should take note).

If there's any comparison, the organisers probably would like to compare "Inspire" with TED and if it continues it may well develop into something similar, though there a lot of very good talks, they weren't particularly inspiring (for example Nick Halstead of Datasift/Tweetmeme gave a very impressive talk on Big Data - but was it inspiring?).

Some products that people talked about are inspiring (i.e. Angry Birds), but the actual talk (or interview with Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio) again wasn't.

Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy was probably the exception and gave a brilliant talk which was also inspiring.

It was a good idea to change the exhibitors for each day (well most of them) and the stands were quite busy.