The man who created the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, is to be the key-note speaker at the the Bermuda e-Commerce Conference - eCC - to be held in October.

Mr. Berners-Lee is the reason we write "http//" and "www." before a Web address - creating the parameters within which the whole system of Web pages works.

The eCC organisers yesterday announced they had managed to entice Mr. Berners-Lee as a late addition to the programme and to address the 250 delegates expected to attend the event.

In what is being seen as a coup for the locally organised event, Mr. Berners-Lee is expected to give his insight into the future of the Web: "from his unique perspective as its founder and creator," the organisers of the October 3-5 conference said yesterday.

Mr. Berners-Lee created the Web in 1990 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

"Mr. Berners-Lee is renowned globally for his unique capacity to envisage the future technology and global communications and has the incredible talent to then design the platforms on which to create that future," said Pat Phillip-Bassett, of the eCC organising committee.

"Mr Berners-Lee is undoubtedly a genius living among us and the Internet generation is poised and ready to hear about where the World Wide Web will take us to next."

Mr. Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford University and holds the the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He also directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organisations with the mission to develop text processing software. Not only did he create the Web, but he also wrote the first web client (browse editor) and server.

His is also the author of "Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor."

Mr. Berners-Lee will be the jewel in the crown of the third eCC, and will be joined by Nick Jones of Jupiter Communications, Markus Wilhelm of Bertelsmann Online, Ty Sagalow of AIG eBusiness Risk Solutions, Matt Bishop of the Economist, Bob Tedesci of the New York Times and Douglas Graham of IDDEX.