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Latest - Organisation: BBC

Brian McBride

Brian McBride was elected President of the CBI in 2022, bringing nearly 50 years’ experience of executive and advisory roles in major technology and commercial enterprises.  Brian’s career tracks and illuminates key developments in information and communications technology and how it has changed our lives: from office automation and mainframes to personal computers, mobile phones, internet and online services.  From his current position and experience he offers views on a range of contemporary issues.   

Tim Johnson

Tim Johnson is perhaps best known to those in IT as the co-founder of Ovum, one of the foremost analysts of the industry, that subsumed another familiar name, Holway, and still produces reports, now as part of Datamonitor. 

Tim describes himself as a researcher, a role he has been carrying out since becoming a science correspondent in 1963, producing material on key technologies, markets and issues in various media, through the nationals press and his own brands like Ovum, Point Topic, and Look Multimedia.? His pioneering work includes some of the first publications on packet switching, expert systems, video cassettes and the use and applications for data communications across 17 European countries.?

Tim comes from a line of ancestors involved in technology and media and his father wrote a report recommending the installation of a computer in the design department of Roll Royce in 1953. 

Rory Cellan-Jones

Rory Cellan-Jones provides a sharp, insightful view of the Tech in the Internet age.  He was a reporter for the BBC for 30 years, initially covering business, which got him interested in the burgeoning business of IT in the 90s.  As the industry developed he met the key players from Bill Gates to and Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and recalls the launch of the iPhone as a masterpiece of PR theatre. He chronicled  the rise and burst of the .com bubble in the UK in his book dot.bomb. 

Now retired from the BBC he has reflected on the exciting and dangerous world of what he calls “the social smartphone era” in his contribution to the archive and in his new book Always On. One of his biggest mistakes, he says, was getting excited about Google Glass, which did not look cool.

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Richard Hooper

Richard Hooper studied Russian and German at Oxford and then joined the BBC. His passion for media technology was inspired when, as a Harkness scholar, he spent 21 months in the US looking at innovative educational technology projects.

“I learnt in America,” he says, such wonderful quips as: “Technology is the answer – but…what was the question?  That still resonates firmly today.” He also likes to quote the axiom coined by Marshall McLuhan, one of his heroes: “The medium is the message”.

Richard took on his first senior role in the UK IT industry in 1973 as Director of the National Development Programme in Computer Assisted Learning.

At BT during the early 1980s, he helped pioneer Prestel, the first version of the internet.  He also ran Yellow Pages when it was a FTSE100 company, and oversaw start-ups such as Telecom Gold, the UK’s first public email service.

In 1987, as managing director of Super Channel, the ITV- and BBC-backed pan-European satellite channel, Margaret Thatcher asked him to give the introductory presentation at a Downing St seminar on broadcasting policy.

His wide-ranging career in communications also includes being founding deputy chairman of Ofcom, chairman of the Broadband Stakeholder Group and numerous advisory and consultancy roles. He has just published a book on the art of chairing called Making Meetings Work.