When he was 16 Marc was expelled from school, just a few weeks before he was due to sit his exams.  However, his life changed when he won a Guardian scholarship to the School of Communication Arts, the advertising school which closed in 1994. After a period of time South Africa, Marc returned to the UK where he started an Internet company which was bought for just under £20 million in 2000.  Marc is credited with inventing the first video banner ad and is the only entrepreneur to have won two international Red Herring 100 awards for two different companies in the same year.

Marc is the Dean of the reopened School of Communication Arts which he hopes ‘will revive its reputation as of the most important and loved schools of creativity and develop another generation of creative thinkers possessing the commercial nous to survive and succeed in the competitive world of marketing.’

With the likelihood of government-supported ‘Free Schools’ opening in England in the near future, Marc knows only too well what it is like to open a school of his own.

We can’t wait to hear Marc tell the TEDxOrenda audience about what it is like to open a school of your own.

We are particularly pleased to announce that the 5th speaker at TEDxOrenda is a truly inspirational woman Naomi Jane (@missnaomijane).

Naomi has a very impressive CV in which she can boast that not only is she Director of the 4WD Foundation,she is also member of the Channel 4 Educational Advisory Board and Youth Trustee for the Donald Chesworth Educational Trust, providing disadvantaged young people with grants enabling them to continue their education.

Naomi will tell the TEDxOrenda audience about the importance of offering ALL young people opportunities to move their lives forward.

A rivetting and authoritative speaker, Vinay deals with many topics that most people ignore, as is well illustrated by the video above. He is currently curating a massively crowdsourced collaborative publication called ‘The Future We Deserve‘ which is ‘a place to create and share our visions of the possible future for the people and the planet… collecting 100 visions of the future, both dreams and practical technical realities, in a sourcebook for creating a new future.

Vinay has also devised The Hexayurt, an Open Source solution costing less than $100 and which could be the ideal solution for providing better accommodation for a variety of natural disaster situations.  It is made by ‘putting six sheets of plywood on their sides in a hexagon. Cut six more sheets in half diagonally, and screw them together into a shallow cone. Lift the roof on to the wall with a large group of people, then fasten it down with more screws. Seal and paint it for durability.‘

We look forward to hearing Vinay tell the TEDxOrenda audience about Open Source solutions to everyday problems.

playmakers video 01 : alex fleetwood and the sandpit from thinkpublic on Vimeo.

Alex Fleetwood is Director of Hide&Seek, he also produces film and games. He founded Hide&Seek with Gideon Reeling in 2007 after attending Come Out and Play in New York. As well as Hide&Seek Alex works with artists and broadcasters on lots of things, including The Eternity Man, a film opera for Channel 4, and The Soho Project, for the London Games Festival.

Alex‘s latest venture which has just arrived in time for Christmas, is the Boardgame Remix Kit, which takes tired perennial games such as Monopoly, and reboots them in ways that make them far more exciting.  This is typical of Alex‘s innovative work which taps into our willingness to rediscover the joy of playing – a Hide&Seek event at a Late Night for Adults Only at the V&A Museum in March 2010 saw an incredible turnout of around 4,500 people turn up to participate.

We look forward to hearing Alex tell the TEDxOrenda audience about rebooting old ideas.

Melina Sydney Padua is the creator of the 2DGoggles blog which featuring her animated account of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage – which imagines what it would have been like had the world’s first computer programmer and the man who invented the first computer joined forces to become a crime-fighting duo. The comic is actually based on Sydney’s thorough research on the biographies and correspondence between Babbage and Lovelace.

Sydney has worked as character animator on well known films including: Clash of the Titans, The Golden Compass, The Iron Giant & Prince Caspian. This sample of Sydney’s work shows her painstaking attention to detail.

We look forward to hearing Sydney tell us about the importance of research when creating new products at TEDxOrenda.

In keeping with the festive spirit prevalent at this time of year, and by way of creating excitement for the forthcoming TEDxOrenda, we’ve decided to unveil our speakers 1 at a time on each of the next ’12 days of TEDxMas’.

So without further ado, its my honour to announce that our FIRST speaker will be none other than Tom Watson MP.

As Wikipedia states, Tom rose to prominnence in most people’s minds when he passionately “Tom Watson led a small number of MPs in speaking out firmly against the Digitial Economy Bill as the bill was being passed through parliament in April 2010 during the ‘wash-up’ period before the election. He took part in a protest against the bill outside Parliament on 24 March 2010“.  And as such he spoke for the layman as it was clear that the actually ‘gets’ the technology that he so passionately spoke about, compared to many other MPs who did not seem to fully understand the implications of this new act.  This event saw him going ‘against the whip’, which, as he Tweeted at the time, made him feel ‘utterly sick‘.

To those that follow him on Twitter, Tom is an engaging raconteur with a deep interest in the way that technology affects our everyday lives.  Any MP that includes the line ‘We know that you’re too busy fighting off your biological urges and being l33t hax0rs to Get Involved, but politics is cool, m’kay?‘ in his blog,  is certainly someone to take note of.

Tom‘s awareness of technology today is epitomised by the biography in his own blog which states: ‘One day he’ll do it [update his biography].  One day.  It can’t be worse than his Wikipedia page, after all’.

Tom is always an engaging speaker and we look forward to hearing him talk at TEDxOrenda with great anticipation.



Maz Nadjm is responsible for Sky Portal’s social media strategy and implementation. The Sky Portal has over 1 billion monthly page impressions and many millions of unique visitors. Maz works closely with each Sky site, providing on-going technology and strategy assessment within the context of the competitive landscape and Site needs.

In addition to his role at Sky, Maz has launched the Times Online commenting system. Prior to Sky, Maz co-founded Rareface and InfieldParking.com, a social networking site and growing online community of NASCAR racing fans in commercial partnership with its most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Maz is a mentor for start ups, video blogger for Sky News TechTalk, founder of www.Mazi.TV and CozyTweetup.com.

Maz will talk about ways in which communities can be given a voice, and how this should be handled.

Dougald Hine (@dougald)

Dugald works with ideas – exploring and developing them, and collaborating to put them into practice. This involves writing, speaking, bringing people together from different worlds to find common narratives, then helping to steer the ideas that come out of those conversations into reality.

In 2006, he co-founded School of Everything: a Web 2.0 startup that makes it really easy to find people near you to teach or learn with in your local area. The site won a New Statesman New Media Award and a Prime Minister’s Catalyst Award in 2008, and was an Official Honoree in the 2009 Webby Awards.

He is still involved in School of Everything, but now spends most of my time on other projects. These currently include:

Space Makers – an online and offline network, connecting people involved in creating collaborative spaces, including co-working, hack labs, arts spaces, social centres and temporary use of empty shops

The Dark Mountain Project – a new literary movement for an age of global disruption.

Dougald will talk about the importance of community involvement in making a project happen.

Alfie Dennen (@alfie)

Alfie is described in his Wikipedia entry as a creative technologist, artist, and founder of several prominent websites based around around mobile blogging.  He co-founded Moblog which received prominence when The service gained prominence in 2005 when Eliot Ward uploaded a photo to the site from one of the London Underground bombings.  The Arts Council recently announced that  that Dennen’s Bus.Tops project was Shortlisted for the London award in the Artists Taking The Lead Public Art competition. The project was awarded £500,000 to create a new work of public art in London.

Caroline Bosher (@carolinebosher)

A Special Agent on a mission to transform businesses through exceptional branding and connections.  Caroline has a passion for infiltrating high calibre networks, uncovering remarkable customer experiences, and working with her team to co-ordinate all components required to create strong brand attraction.  Working in London, Sydney and New York she ‘cross-pollinates’ ideas across industries, cultures and entrepreneurs to ensure her clients stand out from the crowd and build their tribe of raving fans.