"Ray's talk was a big hit. We were thrilled."
McKinsey
WIKIPEDIA
BIOGRAPHY
An inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil has been described as 'the rightful heir to Thomas Edison'. His extraordinary career as an inventor started at high school, when he appeared on American television, playing a piano composition. He explained that the piece had been composed by a computer - which he had built himself. That was in 1965.
Ray went on to invent the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition software, the first print-to-speech synthesiser, the first music synthesiser capable of recreating the piano and other orchestral instruments and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
Described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes, Ray's print-to-speech reading machine transformed the lives of thousands of blind people. Recently, he introduced a pocket-sized version.
Among his many awards, Ray has received no less than14 honourary doctorates. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology, Lemelson-MIT Prize (America's largest prize for invention and innovation), and the Louis Braille Award for service to the blind. He is included in the Computer Industry Hall of Fame and the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the US Patent Office.
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SPEECH TITLES
Innovation
Future technology
FEE BANDS
CONFERENCE SPEAKERS
OVER £25K
THE CLIENT'S VIEW
by Cate McReadie / Grant Thornton
The qualities I look for in a speaker are knowledge of their subject area, a link to the theme of the event and relevance to the audience so they can make a connection.
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It's worth paying a premium for a big name for a prestigious, long-standing or launch event. People will remember the speaker, not what they ate or if the room was too warm. Even when budgets are constrained, I see value in guest speakers; without them the event can feel flat, especially if speakers have been used in the past.
I measure success by the atmosphere at the event and the buzz in the room - plus feedback from clients and speakers themselves.