What Happened at Digital Hub: IP, Cybersecurity Farewells, and a Farmer's Lambing Record
Last night was a special one at Digital Hub. We had a packed room at Lanes Hotel, a keynote that genuinely surprised people, a cybersecurity update that included friendship fraud and AI-poisoned Google results, and a farewell that none of us were quite ready for. Here’s what happened.
Pip Hellier on Intellectual Property: The Talk Nobody Knew They Needed
Pip has been a Digital Hub community member for three years. He’s got a PhD in chemistry, transitioned into intellectual property and patents, and spends his days helping small businesses turn their ideas into something with commercial value. When Richard invited him to give the keynote, it felt like the right time to bring IP to a room full of people who probably hadn’t thought about it since the last time they saw a trademark symbol on a cereal box.
His initial title for his talk was brilliant: “My IP Address” but he went with a ChatGPT-generated alternative in the end. The original joke still landed perfectly with the room though.
What Pip did really well was make IP tangible. He used the Kellogg’s cornflakes example to explain how trademarks work: they’re not about what the product is, they’re about who makes it. He walked through the difference between registrable rights (things you apply for, like patents and trademarks) and unregistrable rights (things that come into being when you create something, like copyright). And he was honest about the costs and effort involved, which I appreciated. Too many talks about IP make it sound easy and cheap. It’s neither.
The bit that really got the room’s attention was about what happens when a business dissolves. If you don’t move your IP out before the company is wound up at Companies House, it becomes property of the crown. Gone. And your competitors can buy it from the government. Pip said he’s seen it happen, and the look on a few faces in the room told me that landed hard.
His practical takeaway was simple: start an IP management system. Track what you create, when you created it, who created it, and what you plan to do with it. You can build one yourself using tools like Microsoft Power Automate (Pip has done exactly this, partly thanks to things he learned at previous Digital Hubs), or you can buy one off the shelf. The point is that most businesses have no idea what IP they’re sitting on, and that’s a problem when an investor asks or a competitor copies.
He also made a point that I think applies well beyond IP: these rights are tools, not trophies. Accumulating a pile of trademarks and patents isn’t the goal. Using them to achieve a commercial advantage is. Every business in the room has different commercial priorities, and the right mix of IP will depend entirely on what you’re trying to do.
There was a live poll at the start. About half the room described their IP situation as “not great, not terrible” and a handful admitted to being “a penguin on fire.” By the end, I think most people felt a bit more confident. That’s what Digital Hub is for.
Adam Pilton’s Final Cybersecurity Update
This was a tough one. Adam has been part of Digital Hub for about two years, delivering cybersecurity updates at every event. He’s taken a subject that most people find dry and made it engaging, practical, and occasionally genuinely alarming in exactly the right way. Last night was his final update before moving on to focus on his own training and advisory work, speaking at Cyber UK, and the National Cyber Security Show.
His update covered a lot of ground. Ransomware payments are up 24% year on year, partly because AI is now being used to assess the value of stolen data and identify which pressure points to exploit. Signal and WhatsApp users are being targeted through fake support messages that hijack accounts and exploit the trust of everyone in your contacts list. Companies House had a vulnerability where pressing the back button four times in a web filing session let you see other companies' directors' home addresses and dates of birth. And Samsung released a report saying 93% of SMEs had experienced a cyber incident in the past 12 months, with over half providing no cybersecurity training to staff at all.
Two things from Adam’s update stuck with me. The first was friendship fraud: scammers joining social media groups for isolated or vulnerable people, spending years building trust, and then exploiting that trust for money. One victim made 60 separate transactions over four years to someone they believed was escaping domestic abuse. It’s a despicable evolution of romance fraud, and it’s targeting the people least equipped to spot it.
The second was memory poisoning. This isn’t cybercriminals. It’s businesses embedding hidden instructions in their blog posts and documents that, when you feed those documents into an AI, rewrite the AI’s behaviour. So if you paste a company’s white paper into Claude and then ask for a recommendation, the AI might always recommend that company because hidden text in the document told it to. Microsoft have just published research on this, and it’s genuinely concerning.
Adam introduced the room to scam.org, a free tool powered by OpenAI that lets you check if a website or message is a scam, learn about specific threats, find security tools, and get step-by-step guidance on who to report incidents to. He demoed it live: pasted in a fake Microsoft URL (with a zero instead of an O), and within 11 seconds it came back as high risk. It’s the kind of tool you should bookmark and share with everyone in your family.
We gave Adam a proper send-off. He thanked the room, thanked me, Richard and Ellie, and mentioned that he never expected Digital Hub to take him to a nightclub in Weston-super-Mare on a weeknight. Neither did any of us, Adam. Neither did any of us. He’s got a lifetime membership. We’re reviewing the terms.
AI Updates and the Prompting Portal Demo
I took the second half and ran through the latest AI news: the #QuitGPT movement, ChatGPT’s annoying clickbait questions (and how to fix them with a custom instruction), Claude’s Cowork and Dispatch features, the Mythos model leak, Sora shutting down, and Perplexity’s underwhelming mobile browser. I won’t repeat all of that here since it’s covered in this week’s newsletter and the blog posts that go with it.
What I do want to highlight is the demo. I showed off our resources portal, which is something we only make available to people who come to our in-person events. It’s packed with tools we’ve built: a QR code generator, a contacts capture system for events, an elevator pitch prompter, and the thing I’m most excited about right now, our prompting portal.
The prompting portal is a tool we’ve built for saving, organising, and sharing prompts. You can create groups, chain prompts together, attach resources and download links, and export prompt packs to share with colleagues or other businesses. Microsoft Copilot has something similar with their prompt library, and it’s genuinely one of the best features in the Copilot ecosystem. Nobody else offers anything like it. So we built our own, and it works across Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and our own AI called Dinobot.
For the demo, I used a real example from the agriculture sector (it’s lambing season, and we work with farmers too). I showed how a farmer could take a handwritten lambing record, photograph it, feed it into AI using a saved prompt from the portal, and get back a structured weekly summary in their own usual style. The room liked it. A few people who’d been at previous hubs and seen earlier versions of our tools commented on how much it’s grown.
I also demoed a shortcut I built for iPhones using AI Actions. If someone steals your phone and swipes down to turn on aeroplane mode (which stops you tracking it), the shortcut checks Face ID. If it’s not your face, it turns aeroplane mode back off, takes a photo of the thief, and emails it to you. If it is your face, it carries on as normal. Adam approved.
What’s Next
The next Digital Hub is on 28 May at Lanes Hotel. The keynote speaker is Shane Evans, known as The Self-Leadership Guy, and he’s talking about what happens when AI speeds everything up but you haven’t figured out how to slow yourself down. His talk is called AI Is Brilliant. But Is It Running You? and it’s the kind of conversation that doesn’t get enough airtime.
We’ve also launched Open Learning, a new platform for people who want AI and digital skills training but can’t access our funded bootcamps (which have been severely cut, with 90 people on the waiting list for just 10 funded places in Somerset). Open Learning lets you tell us what training you need, and we’re working on making courses available, funded where possible, at cost where not. The survey is live on our resources portal.
If you’ve never been to a Digital Hub, it’s a relaxed, TED-style evening with live demos, practical takeaways, food, and sometimes a quiz. No jargon, no hype. Just plain English and things you can actually use. Students and AI Bootcamp alumni attend for free.
Scott Quilter | Co-Founder & Chief AI & Innovation Officer, Techosaurus LTD