So our second Bologna Digital Media event wrapped up last month and boy what a time we had – so many new ideas and a lot of new technology was presented, talked about and as every year our community grew and defined itself more clearly.

Indeed Art and Technology became a defining theme of this year event with inspiration and challenges coming from so many different place.

We were delighted to host 4 Aldus fellows to the fair and a whole programme of publisher visit in Italy and recognize the new platform of augmented and virtual reality that really took the fair by storm.

From new, young developers to tech giants of Google and Lenovo we were able to showcase so much software, services and hardware too all quite a first for the show, imagine showing a tablet live drawing in the illustrators cafe!

We also opened a new business lounge to allow clients to formally network in new ways and awarded for the first time in the BolognaRagazzi Digital Award an AR prize.

It appears a new and stronger relationships of creative technology and art are springing up everywhere and we look forwared to artists pushing the bounderies across all the plaforms. We host Fabian Negin and Timo Dries on the new developer and artist relationship and ended the programme with an fantastic French and UK student ideasfest which we hope to develop more with our global colleagues next year.

For a balanced and open review of BCBF 2017 you can read our friend and journalist Ed Nawotka at Publisher’s Weekly cover all the happenings in that first week of April 2017  HERE.