As IT chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) one of my favourite events of the year is our annual conference, mainly because I get involved in the technology of making this available to our members across the country electronically.

Several years ago I decided to video record our annual conference which this year was held at the Novatel West in London and back in the dim, distant past it was simply a case of recording a megabyte or two and pushing it onto the web site – after all, most of the members had dial-up connections so we were talking about videos the size of a pack of matches.

With guests this year including David Bellamy, Sir Trevor McDonald and General Sir Mike Jackson to name but three, the challenge was on to make the best possible experience available to members back at home. Recent surveys show that a diminishing minority now use narrowband so no excuses!

Like most large organisations we can cater for only a relatively small number of members at our conferences - several hundred out of more than 210,000 - and so for me it is important to remember those who can’t make it – especially the “grass roots activists”.

Thankfully both the technology and the broadband are now routinely up to the job and so this year we made the decision to record pretty much all of our conference and make it available on the web in 16:9 widescreen format, usually getting the video on the site within an hour or less of the event completing.

When we first started recording some years ago things were simple –  with today’s demands for quality I found myself making PC video recordings several gigabytes in size before reducing down to something suitable for the web – and spending most of the day uploading to the site (broadband upload is still the main bottleneck). But at least PCs are now fast enough to make the whole experience a lot of fun.

If you’re interested in any of the above speakers or small business issues in general, take a look – the videos are here: www.fsb.org.uk/conference2008