Alistair Houghton and Alex Turner join the region’s technological leaders at TEDx Liverpool

PERHAPS the quote from analyst Henry Petroski used in one presentation summed it up best – “The possible can never be realised if it is not first imagined.”

The great and the good of Liverpool’s digital and creative communities gathered on Friday for technology, entertainment and design conference TEDx Liverpool.

The event is the first Northern spin-off of the internationally-renowned TED conferences, which have attracted speakers from Bill Gates to Stephen Hawking.

And while the speakers at the Liverpool event at the International Centre for Digital Content (ICDC) may not have been household names, their message was clear – businesses and individuals need to be creative if they are to thrive.

The conference was a sellout, which organisers say shows the strength of the region’s technological community. Attendees agreed, and said they hoped this would not be Liverpool’s last TEDx.

Roy Bayfield, director of marketing at Edge Hill University, said: “Spending an afternoon talking about things like creativity and social media may seem frivolous from a business perspective. But really this is exactly where people need to be right now – creativity is vital in all sectors, and finding innovative ways to connect with people has never been more relevant.

“TEDx was a great example of an event where people came away with ideas to use right now as well as perspectives on the future and a dose of inspiration. And we got marshmallows, which has go to be a good thing.”

The event was also interspersed with videos from past TED conferences – including one from motivational speaker Joachim de Posada about the importance of delaying short-term gratification to achieve long-term success.

He used the example of children presented with a plate of marshmallows, showing that most children could not wait five minutes to eat them – even if they had been promised extra marshmallows for waiting.

The most popular video featured Liverpudlian academic and author Sir Ken Robinson, who told TED in 2006 that education stifled creativity and that schools needed to rethink the way they taught.

Following on from Sir Ken’s extolling of the importance of creativity was the first speaker of the day, fellow native of Liverpool Steve Clayton, who was at TEDxLiverpool to show what was possible when creativity is combined with technology.

Clayton, who describes himself as Microsoft International’s “cloud computing guy”, said: “Technology tends to gravitate to the South East – or people think it does. But when I think of Liverpool, I think of creativity.”

Creativity is a nebulous term, and, as Clayton admitted, it is not a characteristic that is widely associated with his company.

“There’s a myth that Microsoft don’t do creativity and innovation – but they do,” he argued.

He then set out just a few of the things that have been developed that are helping individuals, and businesses, to be more creative.

Seadragon is a technology that uses the streaming process common in videos (so the whole video isn’t downloaded at once, but just the next few seconds) and applies it to images. This means graphics and photos can be smoothly browsed, regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network.

This is being used commercially by Hard Rock Café.

The chain has an archive of rock memorabilia online – currently more than 1,000 items are photographed and catalogued online, which is far more than displayed at its restaurants worldwide, but a mere fraction of the 70,000 items the company has.

But it’s the detail of the photographs that is jaw-dropping.

A 250MB image of Bo Diddley’s guitar can, within seconds, be zoomed in on to reveal the fingerprints that are on the instrument.

Mr Clayton also demonstrated Photosynth and Photo Gallery, developments which enable people to be very creative with their photographs but also offer great opportunities for the tourism, leisure and education sectors, among others.

Clayton said: “How can we make an experience on the web better? I can now start to visit places in a fairly high-fidelity experience.

“All these things are helping people be more creative in their particular industry.”