Georgie is a leading technology journalist and presenter of Channel 5’s The Gadget Show, testing latest devices and reporting on consumer trends. Alongside her Gadget Show work Georgie has reported for ITV Tonight, Good Morning Britain and ITV Weekend, and is a regular on The Jeremy Vine Show. Georgie also comments on breaking tech stories for the likes of Channel 5 News, Radio 5 live, talkRADIO and BBC Radio 2. Her writing credits include The Mirror, Tech City News, The Guardian, Marie Claire and Metro. 

Georgie is passionate about women working in technology and devotes time to encouraging more girls to be involved in STEM subjects. She works alongside Girls in ICT, the IET and Childnet in striving to make technology and the digital world as exciting, safe and inclusive as possible. 

Never one to shy away from a challenge, Georgie once held the world record for the longest time spent in virtual reality (VR) – 26.5 hours. And pushing the VR experience to the max she once bungee jumped while wearing a VR headset! Georgie graduated from King’s College London with a First in English Literature and has a Diploma in Radio Production.  

John Simmons is an industry-recognised expert on Web media standards. He drove Microsoft’s efforts to define DRM-interoperable encoding, adaptive bitrate streaming, the collaboration with Google, Comcast, Netflix and the W3C for HTML5 Media Extensions and a multi-year Apple collaboration to develop the Common Media Application Format. 

John’s standards evangelism across the media and entertainment industry led to the creation of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Web Application Video Ecosystem (WAVE) project, a 60-company collaboration to adopt ISO/IEC and W3C standards for streaming media on a global scale. 

John received the CTA 2017 Technology Leadership Award for the creation of the WAVE Project and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) 2019 Emmy Award for the Microsoft, Google, Comcast, Netflix and W3C “Standardisation of HTML5, Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) and Media Source Extensions (MSE) for a Full TV Experience”.  

Recently retired from Microsoft, John now runs a media standards consulting business from his home in the Cascade Range foothills, east of Seattle, Washington. 

Andy is Senior Vice President, Global Distribution Technology for Universal Pictures based in London and has over 25 years technology experience in the media industry. Currently Andy is focused on managing the technical aspects of Universal’s premium video on-demand initiative, new innovative experiences around the purchase of digital content, immersive experiences, how artificial intelligence and machine learning can enhance the viewing experience of movies, as well as how it can help content protection initiatives.  

Innovation has been key throughout his career and recently he received a Fellowship from the Royal Television Society for his “outstanding contribution to television”. He has also recently worked as a UK Section Manager for the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers and has been an active member of the Digital Television Group in the UK as well as other cross industry forums.

His previous roles include Head of Technology Planning for ITV in the UK where among other projects he was involved with was the launch of digital terrestrial television, widescreen and latterly the successful trials of high definition distribution.  

Colin has worked in the BBC Natural History Unit (NHU) for over 20 years, working on a range of innovative output from the very first Springwatch and Big Cat Live to launching BBC Earth’s Earth Unplugged Channel.   

More recently Colin has been responsible for the Natural History Unit’s output on the One Show, pioneering the use of novel technologies from 360 GoPro time-slice rigs to ‘sound cameras’.   

Colin is an enthusiastic adopter of new technologies. As Senior Innovation Producer he works with all NHU productions to look at the future of wildlife film making and how new technology such as drones, thermal imagery and remote cameras can be integrated to allow us to bring the natural world to our audiences in ways never previously achieved. 

Shirlene is the Global Market Development Director at Finecast, focused on the growth and deployment of Finecast internationally. Prior to this she worked on the launch of Fiducia DLT, a revolutionary disruptive open source blockchain technology platform, designed to deliver transparency to the programmatic supply chain. 

Shirlene has also worked at Amobee, Adconion and Smartclip, as product expert and business owner for connected TV across all markets, mostly based in New York. In early 2009 Shirlene was Director of Yahoo! Connected TV, the very first connected TV platform that delivered internet content to TV sets, where she covered all major European markets and was responsible for strategy implementation, partnership development and product marketing.  

Previously she has held positions as Product Marketing Director at Yahoo! responsible for the successful pan-European roll out for several of Yahoo!’s advertising products; Commercial Director at BlueLithium, responsible for sales and marketing; Opodo as Sales and Distribution Director and as Partner and Media Manager at Vodafone. With over 20 years of experience in the digital advertising industry on an international level across product, sales and go-to-market, Shirlene has a deep understanding of delivering insight and customer value in the ever changing digital and TV landscapes.