Tuesday's Google Firestarters on Artificial Intelligence and robotics (more on that later) was the 20th London event in our series of Firestarters for the planning community and approaching our 40th Firestarters event overall if you include the series we've run for the performance marketing community and those that we've done around the world. So Firestarters is officially five years old, which is quite something.
We started back in 2011 with an idea to create an event that facilitated debate, provocation and conversation around some of the most interesting areas of challenge and opportunity in our industry. Across that time we've had provocations from over 100 speakers including thinkers, writers, designers and doers like Cory Doctorow, Tim Harford, Anab Jain, David Hieatt, and many of the smartest minds in the industry such as Mel Exon, Russell Davies, Amelia Torode, Richard Huntingdon, Sue Unerman, Faris Yakob, Mark Earls, Patricia McDonald, Phil Adams, John Willshire, Dave Trott, Paul Feldwick, Andy Nairn, and Anjali Ramachandran. Firestarters has expanded overseas to events in New York, Cannes, SXSW (thanks to the brilliant Ben Malbon), Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and we've been able to feature some great speakers in those events including amongst many others Sarah Watson, Chloe Gottlieb, Ian Fitzpatrick, Noah Brier, Graeme Wood, and Dave King.
There's too many good speakers and memorable talks to mention but over the past five years I think we've built up a real sense of community, purpose and momentum around Firestarters that have made the events (IMHO) completely unique. So to mark the occasion Scriberia (who've been with us since the beginning) have crafted a special one off fifth anniversary visualisation above (which you can see in all its glory here). I'd really like to thank Google for hosting, being so great to work with and helping to maintain the Firestarters spirit, all those amazing speakers, and of-course all those who've come along to one of our events to get inspired, see and hear something challenging and different, and have a bit of fun. It's been great, and long may it continue.
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