I recently had the honour of speaking on a TorontoTechWeek panel organized and moderated by the one and only Jen Evans, called Future Forward – The Digital Customer Experience in 2010, 2015 and beyond, which addressed a variety of topics related to online marketing, privacy, and consumer experience. I was entirely out-classed by my fellow panel members:
- Parth Shukla, Director Interactive & MultiChannel Marketing, Bell.ca
- Sulemaan Ahmed, Director of Digital Marketing at Harlequin Enterprises
- Steve Mast, Vice President and Managing Director, Delvinia
- Brendan Kenalty, Loyalty and Retention Programs, RIM
A write-up of the panel is available (in PDF form) if you’d like to read more about the whole thing and what came out of our mouths when we had our pundit hats on. A big thank you to Joaquim Menezes, who has written a great article called Playing fellow travelers on a streetcar – the “new face” of mobile gaming, which is somewhat embarassingly dedicated to the punditry that came out of my pie hole on the topic of gaming. Apologies for the spotlight hogging to my fellow panelists who had much more intelligent things to say 
Overall it was an excellent panel and I think Jen can take a fair amount of credit for it. She suggested that we use a great ‘crystal ball’ approach in which she prepared about 20 forward looking statements and we worked our way through them, all having a chance to make a brief comment and to build on what others had said. The format really ruled out any possiblity of someone wandering off topic or shamelessly pitching their products, two of the biggest pitfalls most panels fall into. I will definitely be using this for the next panel I moderate!
