A quick chat with Kate Rusell

Kate Russell is an experienced technology speaker and we thought it would be a good idea to ask her a few questions about her previous speaking engagements and find out what she has been up to recently. Read the interview below to find out a bit more about Kate...

Which event has been your favourite and why?

Last year speaking at Euro Disney for EuroStudy Tours to a packed auditorium of 16-18 year olds to try and inspire them to study media and IT. It was terrifying in some ways to face 600 teenagers who had been made to leave the theme park to come and hear me talk, but so rewarding to get all the brilliant feedback from teachers and students after the event and on social media. The icing on the cake was being invited back by the organisers to MC next year’s event, which is a total honour.

Which recent innovation do you wish you had been a part of?

Bitcoin! If I had bought a couple of hundred when I first started reporting on it a few years back I could have paid my mortgage off by now.. oh well.

What piece of tech could you not live without?

The internet, obviously… and 2.5 billion people around the planet feel the same, so I don’t think there is any risk of that. I’d love to do a TED talk about why the internet isn’t as evil as people think it is. I spoke on the subject at a philosophy festival earlier this year and was thanked for being such a cheerful, positive speaker when so many others are very negative and angry

What have you been up to recently?

My crowd funded sci fi novel came out this month and is doing very well. I’m getting a lot of bookings to speak about crowd funding, both from a business/futureology perspective and in terms of workshops to help people run their own. In fact in July I’ve been invited to Azerbaijan by the Council of Europe to chair a discussion panel on this topic and how governance should be handled, so I am really immersed in the topic from a political perspective too. This year it’s reckoned crowd funding will add 270,000 new jobs and inject $65 billion  to the global economy by the end of this year, so it’s going to be an increasingly important topic for tech conversations.

Wow, that’s huge amounts of money! Seems like crowd funding is the way forward.  Is there anything else?

I also continue to be a big consumer/tester/reviewer of health/wearable tech. My latest device is a designed bracelet adornment that measures your exposure to UV, reporting about health risks and advice through an app. Most developers of this type of equipment seek me out to get my opinion, so I am always ahead of the curve in this increasingly important technology area.