Stephen Streater is the head of Forbidden Technologies, producer of web based video editing systems.

Stephen wrote the original FastBrot program for the Archimedes which showed off the power of the ARM processor (and his coding skills) by being able to generate the Mandelbrot Set in a few seconds, when other systems took many minutes or even hours.

But RISC OS users will probably be most familiar with Stephen's work from when he formed Eidos plc to produce the Optima offline video editing system on the RiscPC. While competing systems of the time needed expensive dedicated hardware and large fixed disc arrays, using advanced ARM coded routines Optima was able to do the work in software on cheap removable discs.

As Eidos's focus moved mainly to games publishing (including the massively successful Playstation game Tomb Raider - did you know the in-game movies were in Acorn Replay format?), Stephen moved on to form Forbidden to continue developing video compression technologies.

Stephen will be talking about and demonstrating how video editing can now be done "in the cloud" using Forbidden's software, although the talk will by necessity be quite wide ranging!

There were also rumours that Stephen tried to buy out the Acorn workstation division and release the Phoebe (Risc PC2) when Acorn was closed down, to use it for the basis of the next version of Optima. This could be a chance to find out what really happened...