Thinking Digital part 2: the speakers

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Thinking Digital part 2: the speakers

Written by Rob Colling Saturday, 23 May 2009 23:10

Codeworks, the organisers of Thinking Digital, do a fine job of booking world-class speakers and whipping up hype beforehand, and as the conference began last Wednesday I was really hoping it would live up to its promise. In the event I needn’t have worried. Far from over-egging the pudding it turns out the pre-event hype was actually pretty conservative, and that the pudding was far eggier than claimed.

Of course I have to come clean here and fess up that internetsubtitling.com is a partner of Thinking Digital 2009. We’ll be doing the subtitles for the talks, and for a Brucie bonus I composed the music for the conference ident and played it onstage. But even after I’d had a sliver of insight into what was going on behind the scenes, the sheer breathless, bonkers joy of the event was still a surprise.

One or two talks lost their way a little, but most were utterly enthralling. We in the audience found ourselves sniffing scent molecules, being pelted with plastic balls, and marvelling at the fact that our lunch has more genetic complexity than we do. We were shown how to improve our technology, our brands, our business practices, our lives. And in case that wasn’t interesting enough, it was served up alongside crash courses on building robotic toys and identifying the Higgs boson.

Over the next month or two the internetsubtitling.com team will be getting down to work on the talks, and we’ll hopefully get time to blog about some of the speakers in detail as we caption them. Don't go changing that channel, folks.