Chargers are an inevitable result of ubiquitous consumer electronics. There are phone chargers, tablet chargers, iPod chargers, laptop chargers, and the extension cables required to support them all. At one stage, it became so complicated that the EU stepped in, passing legislation to make all phone chargers identical[1]. But despite this move, we need a lot of wires to keep our devices blazing away.

Yet wireless power transfer has been around in one form or another since the late 1800s, when individuals like Nikola Tesla began experimenting with the technology and demonstrating its feasibility. Since then, the technology has continued to evolve although never truly becoming a widespread feature of consumer electronics. However, all that might be about to change due to a confluence of events necessitating new approaches to old problems.

Online advertising is a big deal; in 2011 approximately £4.8bn was spent in the UK alone on this medium, a rise of over 14 percent on 2010[1]. The biggest growth area within this is the Real Time Bidding (RTB) market. RTB allows advertisers to specify a consumer type they want to target, the site they want to target them on, and then bid against competitors to display their particular ad. This happens at a rate of billions of slots for ads being auctioned every day[2], and has led to the creation of a highly complex and extremely rewarding system, both for advertising agencies, and the businesses which use them. However, the problem is that like any complex and established system, it is at risk of disruption if the underpinnings of this system start to unravel. New technology is emerging which begs the question, is that disruption about to occur?

GfK recently took over the AOP Gallery in Shoreditch to host another TechTalk Live event and hear from former AdMob top exec, Russell Buckley, and his thoughts on the future of disruptive innovation, mobile technology and the future for civilisation.

In attendance were over 90 people from all walks of the London Tech community from researchers and journalists, to entrepreneurs and marketers. Here’s what they had to say about the night…

You can watch Russell’s full presentation

I’m a relative newcomer to the ideas behind disruptive innovation (when Clayton Christensen first published The Innovator’s Dilemma, which provides an evidence-based framework for how new entrants to a market can displace the incumbents by introducing products and services that compete asymmetrically, I was still at school).

When I did, eventually, come across Christensen’s work, I could probably have skipped over the majority of the evidence part; as a market researcher in the tech sector, I only had to look around at the changes taking place in the computing and telecoms markets.

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse” Henry Ford