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I've had a great, warm relationship with O'Reilly Media over the last half decade or so, hanging out at various ETech and Foo Camp events, striking up friendships with their people, helping plan both ETel conferences and contributing to Web2Expo Europe. Tim O'Reilly and I recently spoke about his background and it turns out his mother is from my hometown of Bradford, a place of which he has a lotta fond childhood memories. Indeed, Tim recorded a special message for us back in November…

With that in mind, it's a total pleasure to bring my favourite tech/media luminaries to my adopted hometown of Leeds for their first Ignite evening in the UK, a rapid-fire succession of lightning talks, pioneered by Brady Forrest in Seattle. Ignite organiser Craig Smith, of O'Reilly UK, was keen to hold the first O'Reilly-sponsored Ignite in the North of England, bringing together people from around the M62 corridor and the North East. Craig's originally from Huddersfield and along with Tim's heritage, has helped to locate the event in the heritage of O'Reilly's own people as well as celebrating the region's emerging grassroots tech scene.

We're expecting around a hundred attendees – from London, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Newcastle – and have scheduled eighteen talks in two blocks throughout the evening. We're really proud of the quality of speakers and their submissions – it really wouldn't be possible without their efforts. We have speakers from local startups, international charities, venture capital firms, national broadcasters, academia and healthcare. Wow…and wow!

As well as a great mix of cultural, creative and technological sessions, there'll be opportunities to hang out, socialise and also appreciate the work of some local artists (just before we open up)…here's the schedule for the evening:

17:00    Outofoffice: Art Installation
18:00    Doors Open: Drinks, Snacks & Networking

19:00    Katie Lips: Bringing Social to Coffee on iPhone
19:05    Jeff Allen : IT in Africa
19:10    Tim Panton: Don't forget voice! Telephony hacks for web 2.0 hackers
19:15    Michael Sparks: Embracing concurrency for fun, utility & simpler code
19:20    Dean Vipond: Perfection in design
19:25    Alexandra Dechamps-Sonsino: Could hardware hacking save us?
19:30    Ian Pringle: No News Is Good News
19:35    Dominic Hodgson: The Future of search
19:40    Ed French: Funding for technology startups

19:45    Break & refreshments

20:05    Tom Scott: My Life In Twenty Graphs
20:10    Stuart Childs, Richard Garside, Dave Lynch:
             FriiSpray Digital Grafitti with IR tracking
20:15    Katie Brown: Recovery 2.0 – Digital Inclusion & developing social models of recovery in practice
20:20    Arturo Servin: Practical Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
20:25    Glen Smith: Mass customisation and the one-to-one future
20:30    Guy Dickinson: The Future Of Reading
20:35    Philip Hemsted: Psycho teams and theory of mind
20:40    James Boardwell: James Boardwell: From patterns to patterns!
20:45    Ian Forrester: Tweethookup

20:50    Wrap Up
21:00    Close

Ignite will also be a great example of where Leeds' coworking community is flourishing, particularly the residents of our venue at Old Broadcasting House. Kensei Media will be providing a live HD webcast of the event with True Media filming each presentation for later publication online. So if you can't make it on Thursday, we'll have everything available online within a few days 🙂

We'd also like to thank local brand an interaction designer Dean Vipond for help with print design, Sun Microsystems's Startup Essentials programme for kindly sponsoring the evening's drinks and nti Leeds for the use of Old Broadcasting House.

See you all next Thursday evening – in the meantime, Leeds will also be playing host to another GeekUp event as well as Katie Lips' workshops on The Amazing iPhone and Going Social.