Conferenza

Always On Venture Summit West - Laissez le bons temps rouler!

That captures the general climate of AlwaysOn's Venture Summit West at the posh Pacific-facing Ritz Carlton here in Half Moon Bay.

Several panelists, including Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley, Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson, Angel Investors' founder Ron Conway and Sun Microsystems co-founder and serial entrepreneur Andy Bechtolscheim, acknowledged there may be a bubble yet that doesn't mean some investments won't pay off.

"What leads us to the question 's there a Bubble 2.0 is the question, is there a business model?" noted Samir Arora, venture capitalist and executive, adding this is not being asked enough recently.

Tim Draper noted the requirements of Sarbanes Oxley have made it far more difficult for companies to go public in a timely manner, in the five to seven years that used to be routine. Because it costs $3 million or so to fulfill the regulatory requirements now, many companies will take a decade or more to reach their IPO benchmarks.

In a separate panel, Bill Gurley said some of the current flock of companies are doing very well by most any standards, thank you very much. His example, Second Life, the parallel world company on whose board he sits. Linden Labs, the Second Life company, is bringing $5 million a month in revenue, has a user base that's two-thirds international and one-third U.S., and fully 43% of its members make a profit net of fees on their Second Life commerce.

Andy Bechtolsheim said the quality of the business idea, followed by the quality of the team, were prime investment considerations for any investment; and Conway said only time would how much the current trend of investing may be a bubble.

But that doesn't mean investors and entrepreneurs must not heed the risks of a potential bubble meltdown.

After all, one of the famous bumper stickers seen shortly after the Internet Crash in Palo Alto, at the center of Silicon Valley's startup community, was "Lord, please give me just one more bubble."

This time, presumably, we'll be all the wiser. Right.>

EG'07 - Grand Finale

The final session of eg '07 has just wrapped up with a knockout final section, Keys to Happiness, which drew the audience to its feet repeatedly. Norman Corwin, the 97-year-old writer, essayist, journalism teacher and radio producer who just signed a three-year contract as writer in residence at USC, exited with a standing ovation after reciting a classic tribute to returning soldiers, comedy writer Bruce Vilanch also brought the crowd to its feet after many peels of laughter over his monologue rift, and comic actor Jonathan Winters, 82, drew the audience to its feet both at the start and end of his performance.

Nathaniel Kahn concluded the gathering with a short documentary on pianist Leon Fleisher and his struggle to return to overcome a debilitating condition in his write hand to train himself to play at concert level again with both hands. And, of course, Michael successfully prevailed upon Fleisher to play an exquisitely wonderful closing piece.

"The greatest joys in life are meant to be shared," said Fleisher, in discussion with Michael Hawley, adding that being a soloist is by definition a solitary undertaking.

As usual, we'll post more following the conference, including pictures and our three points abstract, following the conference.

Jonathan Harris shows his latest work.

EG'07 - Comic Interstitial Interludes

eg's team have picked out a hearty selection of interstitial segments, including the Sony Bravia color rabbit commercial (see also this one - and this), and a host of wonderful New Yorker cartoons distributed via Ringtones.

Enjoy.

EG'07 - the Master - RSW

{Photograph: Richard Saul Wurman prepares for a professional photo session against the travertine backdrop of the Getty Center.}

A wondrous stroke of eg - entertainment gathering was having Richard Saul Wurman take the stage at the outset of the third and final day. Following what he described as the "Trash Talk" of Chris Jordan, who has turned monumental photographic compilations of post-consumer detritus into scale-evocative artwork, RSW began with praise for the speakers, volunteers and Michael Hawley's premier event in the role of producer.

As some participants have noted over the last two days, this year's eg really has lived up to what RSW had for years said was his objective with TED - to treat it as a huge dinner party to which he would like to invite people of great genius to share discovery and discussion. This has been, as he called it, "a celebration of conversation," without grandiosity or technical hindrance. "They have not made a computer that nods," he said, referring to the importance of face-to-face interaction.

Wurman concluded by introducing another phenomenal new project that grew from his interest in the growing mega-cities about which comparable data is not available or well understood, much less accessible in a usable and useful manner. The project, 19 cities in the world which will have 20 million people in the 21st century, can be seen here. As is classic with projects Wurman has developed, the graphics are clear, and I recommend bookmarking the website to watch its progress.

Perhaps the one most difficult task which has been a challenge on the second, and now the third, days of eg is clock management. To his credit, Hawley has been kind to speakers running overtime, though gourmet chefs serving Monday's dinner did force some readjustments. Only a small handful of occasions did he mount the stage and start taking slow, small, polite steps towards the speaker to urge a speedy conclusion. Ironically one of these 'offenders' was RSW himself, who beseeched Michael to ignore the talk-ending tactics Richard had suggested for a couple minutes so Richard could finish with a romp through his latest project.

EG '07 Rob Glaser promotes Progressives

Rob Glaser made it out of a snowstorm to provide Monday's kickoff presentation, on an education project he's developed on branding of political progressives in America.

He shared several of the clips, provided in earlier links, and the following data from the best testing results, using the PC / Mac commercial in Indianapolis.

EG '07 Adam Savage x2

Adam Savage interviews himself, a montage created by photographers of EG '07. Savage impersonated Richard Attenborough as imperious and probing questioner, in the left seat, and shifted to the right seat to answer the questions as himself.

Savage spoke positively about the innovation taking place in media and on the Internet. Saying we are standing on the shoulders of giants in science, he predicted a major expansion of innovation and interaction with audiences as open source is more firmly embraced - a trend long promoted in technology by O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly and in media through the Creative Commons organization founded by Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Savage notes he spend much of his life working on special effects, theater effects and in sculpture, witnessing people in past seeking to horde their knowledge rather than to share it. He sees that phenomenon shifting.

EG'07 In Photos

Columbia University physicist Brian Greene demonstrates a theoretical spinning effect - in which two particles are spinning 3,000 miles away from each other in New York and L.A., and when the particle in LA spins down, the NY particle spins "up", and vice versa. Greene said the concept was one Albert Einstein called "Spooky".

EG'07 contretemps and nuggets

Many of the most poignant moments at the eg style of conference are what happens in the betwixt and between - realizing commonalities or contrasts often sparked by some comment, reference, gold nugget that's been uttered on stage.

This morning, for example, I began with a discussion on Libertarian solutions to cutting bureaucracy, and perhaps improving education, over morning coffee with Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Harvey Allison of Attractor, IDEO's Doug Solomon and Krisztina "Z" Holly, who runs the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation. One focus of discussion was Bezos' comment that the learning/feedback loop in education is long, and can impact a generation, though education overall is probably improving by more than schools are credited. He notes it took the Romans 80 years to realize linking acquaducts with lead was not a healthy innovation. While that may have been relatively fast, an education experiment that took as long to determine to have failed might be intolerable. Allison noted perceptible changes in schools are spread rapidly.

Minutes later, RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser kicked off session 3 "Media Biz" with the first public discussion of the results of his "progressive education branding project" undertaken with the Center for American Progress. The project created eight 30-second television spots and test marketed them. The spots include two that are take-offs of Apple Inc's PC/Mac advertisements.

"Aren't YOU a Progressive?", the ads ask in closing. Turns out, in at least one sample, progressive self-identification increases by 67% in these recent tests. The Youtube versions, linked above, were posted a few weeks ago.

No doubt the debate will continue in discussions outside the auditorium, as the contrast of the Progressive record of achievement along and the Libertarian critique make good fodder.

During Monday morning's "Media Biz" and "Nerd Alert" sessions, presenters frequently cited earlier presentations, as Jamy Ian Swiss had done Sunday evening.

Among the most oft-cited was Emily Levine, a perennial favorite "humorist philosopher" of RSW's TED conferences. Levine recounted how she had dealt with diagnosis of apoptosis of her prostate, and with a combination of gravity and humor led the audience through her evolution from comic writer to comic philosopher to "comic oracle", or "Emily 3.0". Apoptosis, it seems, leads to enlargement of the head and extremities. Levine concluded the entire country may be suffering from the malady - starting with the head of state.

Some other observations:

- "99% of medicine that we practice today was developed in my lifetime." - Keith Black, neurosurgeon who has conducted more than 5,000 brain surgeries over two decades.

- Working for the government I was reminded there was a situation the government could actually put me to death - treason, noted Keith Schwab, a Cornell physicist who expressed with a certain nervousness that his work was being supported by an employer who was "now threatening to kill me" if he were to misbehave...

- "There's only three things I've ever been afraid of - electricity, heights and women," - the words of a high wire power line repairman, in a video short interstitial.

- There are 10 times as many stars in the planetary system as there are grains of sand on Earth's beaches. - Paul Horowitz, Harvard professor of physics.

- "We live in a world governed by chance and probabilities," quantum physicist Brian Greene.

- "The web community is a big community. It's not the repository of all knowledge. It's the repository of discovery," Adam Savage, co-star of Mythbusters.

EG'07 feeling in your feet, building Cathedrals with 2 fingers

Michael Hawley has already delivered, as promised, a number of the "magical moments" connecting of synapses and themes between presenters long devised by Richard Saul Wurman as the genesis of the so-called "TED moment".

As Donald Jackson, HRH's Royal Calligrapher, lead 500+ attendees in the packed auditorium in scripting a stylized letter "A" with one hand in the air in front of us, he told us it was important to feel the motion in our feet.

A session later, magician Jamy Ian Swiss expressed appreciation for Jackson's remarks in telling the audience the trick to good magic could also include what happens in your feet. Swiss then proceeded to explain one of his card tricks - "I have a surprise for you," which he said takes most of his students six months or more to learn. He compared it with romantic comedy, and focused on the moment of 'Aristotelian catharsis' which he described as critical to the success of an entertaining trick.

In a different sort of catharsis... Hawley offered a screening of Michael Lawrence's elegant work in progress, the Bach Project. A collaboration among a number of terrific musical artists in homage to the great composer, the film includes music and interviews with some of the most successful contemporary artists, such as Bobby McFerrin. "Bach with two notes, one with the right hand, the other with the left, he can build a Cathedral, said Joáo Carlos Martins, the Brazilian pianist and conductor.

What more suitable metaphor for an event taking place within architect Richard Meier's $1.2 billion travertine-coated Getty Center stone edifice perched on a hilltop above Los Angeles.

EG'07 soars to life above L.A.

The bold, audacious, grand phantasmagoria of eg '07, the entertainment gathering, has just kicked off with the strings of the violinists of the Colburn School here at The Getty Center, perched in its sunshine-bathed peak overlooking the City of Angels.

We are delighted to bring you coverage of this second edition of the conference created by TED founder Richard Saul Wurman and presented this year by Michael Hawley, who has announced he intends to make it an annual extravaganza delivering magical moments from an ecclectic mix of creative minds and performers.

As a classic reacquaintance with the spirit of discovery that had inspired TED over two decades, Hawley has assembled a wondrous constellation of familiar and new. In his first session alone, he followed the superb violin strains with an update by former Microsoft CTO and gourmet chef Nathan Myhrvold of his reflections on the meaning of "cute" in the animal (and human!) kingdom, then turned to two 'newbies' UK Royal Calligrapher Donald Jackson and snow crystal photographer Ken Libbrecht, a physicist at Caltech.

Jackson had the whole, packed auditorium waving our arms and 'feeling' the motion of calligraphy in reproducing a stylized "A" in the air, while Libbrecht's photographs of single snowflakes ranging up to 10 mm in size, as well as exotic crystalline shapes.

Following this were some animated New Yorker cartoons sketches from the site ringtales, and a discussion of how they came to being, and Golan Levin's observations and experiments with media formats - ranging from concerts of attendees' cell phones as the sole musical instrument, but choreographed and seeded with ringtones supplied as they arrived at the concert, to voice-generated environments and self-creating face montages.

Jonathan Harris, who also spoke this year at POPtech, closed off the first session with his terrific presentation on the emotions and demograpics of people's feelings as expressed on the Internet. His parsing allows one to search, for example, for women who feel lame in their 30s when it's raining, as well as individual statements like "I feel as though I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe." Harris focusses on small scale personal stories, as well as diving into larger stories in the physical world, such as a narrative-selectable rendition of a whale hunt in Alaska. Harris ended with a superb series he had collected in Bhutan capturing people, their life's wish, and their sharing of what makes each person happy.

Last year's assembly at the nearby Skirball Center boasted a sense of irreverence and punctuation for RSW, who had vowed it would be a last shebang of his virtuoso gatherings, scheduled as it was practically on the eve of TED. This year, TED helped promote the conference to its own community, and committed to distributing videos of some of the presentations down the road, in a manner presumably similar to the popular TEDtalks.