Tim Howell’s Weblog

A few locals have blogged about Sam Morgan speaking at the elite TED Conference held last week. TED is a conference now run by Chris Anderson, a man I used to work for and with in the early 1990’s. Chris’ initial claim to fame was founding Future Publishing, a UK-based magazine publishing company that achieved great success during the 1990s and into the early part of this decade. You may have heard of some of their titles including PC Plus, PC Format, MacFormat, Future Music and many, many others.

Like many startups, Chris founded the company from a garage using a bank loan, and over several years the company grew into being one of the largest leisure magazine publishers in the UK. The company went public in the early part of the decade, and for a while Chris was on the Sunday Times rich list, worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Since the tech wreck, his fortune shrank, but he’s obviously mixing in the right circles at TED, his latest venture.

I’ve always found the Future Publishing story inspirational, especially given my early association with the company, and it’s great seeing how Chris is now giving so many others inspiration through TED.

(For Wired readers, it’s worth mentioning this is a different Chris Anderson than the one who is responsible for The Long Tail and who is editor in chief of this publication.)