Dave Farrow

FarrowPR, a public relations firm based in Buffalo, New York, was founded in 2012 and offers speaker services, sales training, media coaching, corporate and individual branding, social media and digital marketing, media and public relations services, and event management.

In October 2008, Sony Corporation invited Farrow to participate in a publicity campaign for their just announced PRS-700 Sony Reader. As part of their Reader Revolution campaign, Farrow lived in the DataVision store window on Fifth Avenue, New York City for 30 days. The Reader Revolution campaign was an effort to promote the newest version of the Sony Reader and to increase the engagement of the general public in digital reading. Sony promised that for each page Farrow read, Sony would give a set of 100 E-book classics to an education institution. The goal was to eventually give 15 million E-book titles to various schools by the end of the program. The first 100 schools to start downloading their selected classic titles will also receive and education pack of five Reader Digital Books. During the campaign, Farrow read a total of 44,097 pages, which translates to 102 books.

He memorized on single sighting, a random sequence of 59 separate packs of cards (3,068 cards), which took around 14 hours to memorize. Farrow later recalled these cards at CTV Studios, Daily Planet in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 2, 2007, and the recall took approximately 9 hours. While undertaking this feat, Farrow made just one mistake during the entire attempt, which he corrected without any external assistance. This successful record is currently featured in the Guinness Book of World Records, 2009 edition, and remains unbroken to this day. What makes this record challenging is that participants can only see each card once with zero repetition and they are only allowed 0.5% errors while many other records allow a much high error rate. Therefore, this record is currently considered the most difficult memory feat for volume and accuracy of memory.

Farrow first met his wife, Andrea Lee Zakel at Toronto's Polaris Star Trek convention in 2004. They were legally married in 2008 at Toronto City Hall and had their wedding at Backus Mill Heritage and Conservation Centre. They currently live in Buffalo, New York and have one son, Alexander, born in April 2014.

At the age of 21, Farrow received his first Guinness World Record for Most Decks of Playing Cards Memorized in a Single Sighting in 1996 where he memorized the order of 52 decks of playing cards, randomly shuffled together, and recalled them correctly under Guinness Record rules (a total of 2704 cards) in a single sighting. This feat was accomplished at the Guinness World Records museum in Niagara Falls, Ontario and is featured in the Guinness Book of World Records, 1997 edition. Years later in 2002, Dominic O'Brien broke his record by memorizing 54 decks of cards. By this time, Farrow was able to easily break the record again in 2007.

After gaining international attention for his 1996 Guinness World Record accomplishment, Farrow continued to utilize his own memory techniques and skills to educate himself in the field of nanotechnology. His passion in nanotechnology led him to speaking at conferences across North America, in front of the research division of Johnson & Johnson and to members of the White House Task Force, as well as being featured in a nanotechnology trade magazine. Building on this success, Farrow founded the nanotechnology company, Accella Scientific Inc. In 2003 where he was involved in a U.S. patent filing for a reliable hand-held HIV diagnostics device that he hopes to bring to market and change the way HIV is tested in developing countries. In 2010, Farrow founded Farrow Inc., which as of 2015 has subsidiaries Farrow Memory, FarrowPR and Farrowbot.

David Andrew Farrow (born January 10, 1975) is a two-time Canadian Guinness World Record Holder for Most Decks of Playing Cards Memorized in a Single Sighting, entrepreneur, memory coach, speed reader and keynote speaker. He is best known for winning the Guinness World Records for Most Decks of Playing Cards Memorized in a Single Sighting in 1996 and again in 2007 when he set out to reclaim his record after it was beaten in 2002. The initial record was set at the Guinness World Records museum in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada while the latter was performed for Discovery Channel Canada at CTV Television Network studios. Both records were accomplished under the controlled supervision of multiple cameras and multiple independent witnesses.

Dave Farrow was born on January 10, 1975, in Kitchener, Ontario, to Wayne and Virginia Farrow. Born into a blue-collar family, his father Wayne is a retired factory worker, who dealt in space shuttle parts and his mother Virginia is a homemaker. After resuscitating him twice during birth, doctors offered a bleak prognosis, suggesting Farrow was unlikely to survive past his first year due to the numerous health problems that would plague his infancy and childhood. He was constantly in and out of the hospital during his formative years, which affected his studies and severely impacted his learning.

Farrow has an older sister, Kathy, who was born in September 1973. Growing up, he and his family would go to their family cottage at Biscotasi Lake Provincial Park in Biscotasing, Ontario, on a regular basis for family vacations. The family trips to the outdoors helped build his passion for wilderness survival and hiking.