Silicon Beach: Bournemouth September 18 & 19

There's the chance to get more national recognition for Bournemouth and Poole's digital innovation, with the expansion of the Silicon Beach conference into the Silicon Beach+ festival.

September 18 and 19 are the dates for the fourth, and largest, Silicon Beach conference, attracting 21 of the UK's leading thinkers and practitioners from the worlds of advertising and digital innovation.

Significantly, Bournemouth Borough Council have committed to support the conference for the next three years; founder Matt Desimier, of ThinkCreateDo, is delighted.

“I've produced the two-day event for the last three years, the intention always being to create an event of national significance that just happens to be based in Bournemouth,” he said. “ The event has been a huge success, enticing some big name speakers, and it continues to do so. The line-up this year is very impressive, even if I do say so myself, and the audience travels from all over the UK to attend.”

There have been some exciting and ambitious start ups in the past three years to add to the 400+ agencies in total across Dorset. UpRaw and DoMore Magazine, thriving what's on and what's hot digital magazines; The Game, an ambitious glossy high end health magazine; and BournemouthNews.info, an independent news website who work with Bournemouth's Media School to give students real-time experience of reporting, photography and video production - they will be out in force throughout the two days of Silicon Valley, experimenting with new realtime news reporting techniques and social media formats.

“And then if you position SiliconBeach and SiliconBeach+ alongside the area having the World's Largest Open Device Lab, WordCampUK coming to Bournemouth this July, All About People happening in two weeks, Re:Develop taking place in August too, ThinkCreateDo, the two universities and a myriad of award-winning agencies, Bournemouth is emerging as a creative and digital hotspot to rival Brighton or Bristol,” Matt said.

SiliconBeach+ this year offers a number of additional events in the run up to the festival. These include:

• The Business of Web Design (in collaboration with The Business of Web Design);
• Words for the Web (in collaboration with A Thousand Monkeys);
• She Who Dares, Wins (in collaboration with SheSaysUK);
• Once Upon a Time... - a one-day conference celebrating brands and their stories (potentially in collaboration with Creative Social)
• Think Create Do! - a one-day conference celebrating the indigenous agency talent of the area;
• Meetdraw - a regular quarterly networking meet-up that attracts 200+ attendees
• Civic Hack (in collaboration with hackbmth and Bournemouth Data Stream);
• The Art of New Business (in collaboration with The Art of New Business);
• International Speed Networking (in collaboration with CHAIN2);
• SiliconBeach 2014 (the flagship two-day conference).

See siliconbeach.eu for more information.