Ray Hammond – Keynote Speaker

For over 30 years Ray Hammond has researched, written, spoken and broadcast about how major trends will affect society and business in the future.  He is also a successful and proven business leader and serial entrepreneur with hands-on experience of creating, building and leading thriving businesses.

In 2010 he was honoured with a UN gold medal for services to futurology by Mikhail Gorbachev. In the accompanying citation President Gorbachev said “We are delighted to honour Ray Hammond for his constant commitment to research and for his stunning speculations about the future enlightened by scientific knowledge and an evident concern for humankind.”

Ray Hammond is the author of 17 books about the future, a body of work which he began in 1980 and which stands as testament to the long-term accuracy and reliability of his foresight.  He is now living in the future he first described over three decades ago.
The On-Line Handbook (1984) was the world’s first book to identify the importance of the Internet and to identify ‘search’ as the driving force behind on-line advertising and e-commerce.  His ground-breaking publication The Modern Frankenstein (1986) became the first book to predict the importance of DNA analysis, genetic engineering, cloning and the emergence of super-intelligent machines that may become rivals to the human species later in the 21st Century.

In 1996 his international best-seller Digital Business provided a blueprint for Web commerce and provided a business plan for online retail enterprises. He is also the author of four futuristic novels and his books have been best-sellers in the USA, UK, France, Spain, Poland, Japan and China.  In addition, the Intel Corporation commissioned Ray to write a short story based on Intel’s research for The Morrow Project.

Ray Hammond also provides many academic lectures around the world, and is a contributor to the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, U.S.A. and he is an elected Fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Society of Arts (F.R.S.A.) and an elected Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation (F.W.I.F.), a Swiss-registered charity which counts 91 Nobel-laureate scientists among its 3,000 strong fellowship.
Currently, Ray Hammond is working on a book called Smart bodies: How digital technology will transform your health. He is now a member of the Science Fiction Advisory Council (SFAC) of the XPRIZE.  The XPRIZE is a philanthropic organisation established by technology luminaries to encourage and foster innovation in all fields of technology.