A recent podcast of the wonderful BBC Radio 4 programme, Start The Week, featured an interview with Bamber “Your Starter For Ten” Gascoigne, host of the long-running TV quiz show University Challenge. This was a fixture on British television during my formative years. I’m still embarrassed to admit I failed the qualifying rounds at Leicester Univeristy in 1972 and so never appeared on the show along with the other scruffy undergraduates of the era.

Gascoigne is an established author and historian who has launched a fascinating Web 2.0 venture - Timesearch - an intelligent search tool that organizes results on historical time lines.

Timesearch is an invaluable tool for the professional speaker or speechwriter. Suppose, for example, you are an executive at the Hewlett-Packard Company scheduled to speak in Sydney at a Chamber of Commerce event. A simple query in Timesearch focussed on Australia in the 1930’s would show the major events that occurred at the time Bill & Dave were establishing HP:

you can immediately see that the Sydney Harbor Bridge was only seven years old when HP was started in the Palo Alto garage in 1939. Robert Menzies became Prime Minister that year. Both useful local references to build into your notes. Icons to the left and right side of each reference link to Google Images and other website search results to enable easily building your speech content on this topic. So far, so good.

But what if Timesearch allowed wiki-like user generated content to be added to the 10,000 entries Gascoigne has entered into the current database? Now that would be way cool. It would, for example, allow HP’s archivists to add the company timeline and show the intersection of HP’s history with world events. Family histories and details of individual lives and locations would enrich and extend the tool. Gascoigne revealed plans on Start the Week for this exciting option as the next stage of development for Timesearch.

For now, the tool offers a valuable source of ideas for your next speech.

Consider one more example, using fascinating historical cross-references to demonstrate cultural sensitivity. Say you were addressing a visiting delegation from Korea:

How impressed would they be to hear you quote the fact that Koreans invented bronze movable type 60 years before Gutenberg built his press in Germany?

Use Timesearch today to enrich your presentations. And check back shortly to see if it allows you to load your own data into it so your biography becomes a part of world history. Timesearch: when things happen to good people.