As we are rapidly approaching this years DIG SOUTH Festival, we just got word that Yancey Strickler will be giving the closing keynote. Strickler is CEO and one of the Co-Founders of Kisckstarter. This is huge news as Strickler rounds out what is already a pretty robust lineup of presenters and speakers.

According to a release, Strickler’s keynote will be a Q&A style talk:

Jon Yarian, owner of SeaChange, a Charleston-based media relations and strategic communications firm, will interview Strickler and guide an in-depth Q&A with the DIG SOUTH Conference audience.¹

The Q&A, tentatively titled “The True Value of Backers,” should be quite interesting, especially in light of Kickstarter’s recent news. On March 3, 2014 Kickstarter hit a major milestone. Here is what Strickler wrote on the 3rd:

This morning at 4:03am, the one billionth dollar was pledged to a Kickstarter project. You read that right: as of today, more than $1,000,000,000 has been pledged to projects on Kickstarter. Whoa!²

Although adding Strickler to the lineup is major news, it really only underscores the success of DIG SOUTH. Last years inaugural DIG SOUTH was a major success. Both The Industry and Fast Company wrote glowing reviews of the conference that attracted more than 3,000 attendees. This years DIG SOUTH looks to be even better. Among many others, some of the presenters include:

• Richard Bullwinkle, head of television innovation at Samsung Electronics in San Francisco.
• Scott Lamb, international vice president of Buzzfeed in New York.
• Brent Herd, Southeast sales director of Twitter in Atlanta.
• Ben Ortman, social business connector and innovator of global accounts at LinkedIn in New York.
• Tige Savage, managing partner at Revolution Ventures in Washington, D.C.
• Clay Delk, content strategist at Facebook in Palo Alto, Calif.
• Dan Juengst, product marketing of the cloud business unit for Red Hat in Washington, D.C.
• Sid Evans, group editor at Time Inc. in Birmingham, Ala.
• Jason Denenberg, entrepreneurship director at LaunchTN in Nashville, Tenn.³

We’ll see you in Charleston, SC this April!