Conferenza

TED multiplies: TEDAfrica, TEDEurope, TEDGlobal unveiled

Three upcoming TED conferences were announced/confirmed from the TED stage today:

TEDAfrica: Cape Town, South Africa, as previously announced, will have the theme of "What If?" and run from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 2009. Details and registration here.

TEDEurope: Oxford, England, July 22 to 24, 2009. Theme: "The Substance Of Things Not Seen". Registration will be announced soon. The first TEDGlobal was held in Oxford in July, 2005.

TEDGlobal: Mumbai, India, November 2009. Details to follow.

TED2008 - RSW returns to the TEDstage!

Richard Saul Wurman has just been invited to the stage for a conversation with Chris Anderson...a remarkable TED moment. Surrounded by a Sputnik satellite, Guttenberg Bible and other artifacts from Jay Walker's library, RSW, or Ricky as he's known to many long-time TEDsters, began with some tears, then described how marvelous it was to take the stage as part of a session dubbed "is Beauty Truth?"

RSW's return was particularly poignant as he and TED curator Chris Anderson had participated in some bitter feuding over the conference for more than half a decade after Anderson acquired it from its creator - a feud RSW announced had recently and finally ended - and also because Anderson has announced he's pulling TED out of Monterey next year, determining the ever-growing audience to have outgrown the facility here.

"It is true we've had an acrimonious relationship the last four to five years, and we don't now, and that's beautiful" Richard Saul Wurman said.

RSW has often described the TED conference, which he began in 1984, as "the ultimate dinner party" he always had wanted to have... and while he and three others in the audience were there at that first TED, it has created a huge following and inspired both a year-long community of attendees and a slew of TED "Wannabe" conferences.

Richard said he had realized much of the period of acrimony resulted from misunderstanding, and he only recently came to learn how may attendees had come to believe that TED had changed their lives (for the better!). Many had attested to Richard that TED had given them license to engage in wondrous new undertakings in their lives.

In the meantime, RSW had launched a one-time rival, called eG, the entertainment gathering, in the Los Angeles area. MIT's Michael Hawley revived in a second edition of eG last December, and now promises to make it an annual event.

The TED conference is now doing some collaboration with eG, and is expected to distribute some of the eG presentations as part of its "TEDtalks" offering of past conference presentations.

Adobe - Illustrator and Photoshop and Acrobat were all announced from this stage, as was (Sun Microsystems Inc.'s) Java (programming language), even before it had a name, RSW recalled.

"This is the best conference that every happened, and the clones are nothing... well the clones, they are interesting, too, and they give people license to do other things..." he said.

Anderson and Wurman embraced, and said they were collaborating to create the 25th anniversary conference next year, which will be staged at a larger theater in Long Beach, California, under the theme "The Great Unveiling".

"The picture has already been taken," said Chris, at Wednesday night's opening gala, when your co-respondent commented this was a picture that needed to be made! Nonetheless, they were willing to mug again, and RSW could be heard praising the excellence of what he'd witnessed at the opening sessions - welcome words not only to Chris Anderson, but to all tedsters, young and old.

TED2008: TEDprizes to stream Live amid BIG Questions...

Our hosts at TED, which is taking place at its traditional home of Monterey, California, for what may be its last time here, have announced as excerpted below they will be streaming live Thursday the winners of the TED prizes for 2008 as they outline the wishes they want the TED community to help fulfill.

Quick note to the TED Community at large:

There's a huge sense of anticipation in Monterey and Aspen as TED2008 opens today. With 50 main speakers and another 50 shorter talks and performances, there's a real feast in store. For those of you who can't be here, here's how you can enjoy TED from afar.

First and foremost, we are opening up one complete session of TED free to the world, streamed live over the web. It's the dramatic session tomorrow evening when three remarkable individuals each unveil their TED Prize wish. ("One wish to change the world. No restrictions. Think big. Be creative.")

I invite you to join a global audience as Dave Eggers, Neil Turok and Karen Armstrong share their inspiring visions, followed by the uplifting music of Vusi Mahlasela.

You can see the live video feed here on Thursday, starting at 5.15pm US Pacific Time and lasting a couple of hours. You'll probably need a broadband connection to see the video properly. There's a button below the video to select a full-screen view.

Meanwhile you can keep up with the conference by checking in on the official TED blog, plus the brilliant blogs maintained by Ethan Zuckerman and our very own Bruno Giussani. We may have a few tasty surprises for you during the week.

You can also see a rapidly-growing gallery of pictures from the conference here. And Portfolio magazine has an impressive curtain-raiser on the conference here.

Best wishes from the all-abuzz TED Team.

TED2008 asks the BIG Questions?

The extravaganza which is TED began with a blast of Hamlet, out of the darkness on stage as delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony award nominee actor of Shakespeare in the Park. Not just ANY soliloquy, of course... "To be or not to be."

This year's conference is about questions. BIG questions.

Chris Anderson, TED curator extraordinaire, then asks the audience to take a moment of silence to shift into the spirit of curiosity and intrigue and wit and soul-searching that is TED.

Minutes later, third generation paleoanthropoligist Louise Leakey is telling us "we're the only walking upright Ape that exists in the world today." Does that not seem to raise a big question? Well, consider this: many if not most species on the planet co-exist with many other related species, and in fact through three generations of research her family, as it happens, has demonstrated that there were multiple species of hominids at any one time, long ago in history.

Indeed, in 2001 Leaky and her mother, Meave, found a previously unknown hominid, 3.5 million year old Kenyan-thropus platyops at Lake Turkana in East Africa. This was found not far from where her grandparents, Louise and Mary Leaky discovered the bones of Homo habilis, one of at least three species who co-existed as recently as 90 generations ago - or roughly 1.8 million years.

That 2001 find, Leaky said, included "one of the most very special things you can do with your mother," as she showed the two of them brushing off the bones in making their discovery.

As much of the first session, there was plenty to entertain, shock and awe - including the actual human brain Harvard Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor shared from the stage, complete with spinal cord.

Near the end of the first session, "Who are we?" Anderson introduced astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who made a presentation recorded a couple of hours previously from his home in Cambridge, England.

"We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," so it is naturally possible if not likely that it has arisen elsewhere in the universe. "Life appeared on earth within half a billion years of it being possible."

"We don't happen to have been visited by aliens...," he added, discounting observers of UFOs and the like as quacks. However, in answering Anderson, in a matter of seven minutes using his onscreen editing system,

"I think it quite likely we are the only civilization within several light years, otherwise we would have heard radio waves..."

But no one, including the marvelous and wide-ranging images of perennial TEDster and anthropologist Wade Davis or the nearly unfathonable graphics and factoids of artist Chris Jordan {we use 2 million plastic bottles every five minutes - do we?} could prepare anyone for the closing of Jill Bolte Taylor, as she described how she had been overtaken by a stroke on the morning of December 10, 1996.

The scientist described how she'd awakened with a throbbing sensation behind her eye akin in sharpness to eating a big bite of really cold ice cream, and that only after she'd worked out on an exercise machine and taken a shower did she realize the stroke was spreading.

At that moment, she had the actual forethought of mind [literally] to not only realize she was undergoing the stroke, at her home, but to ponder how rare it must be for a brain scientist to actually go through a stroke herself!

Then, no sooner had she thought that thought than "it crosses my mind that I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stroke."

She manages to reach a co-worker, after feeling an arm become paralyzed, and as she's being shifted from one Boston hospital to Mass General, she feels as a balloon letting out air that her energy was lifting from her body, and her spirit surrender.

"In that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life," she said.

In vivid language, Taylor describes how she felt her spirit "like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria," surrendering to the notion either her physicians would save her, or not, and yet wondering if she would ever be able to fit that enormous feeling of euphoria back into her body.

Then, she enraptures the hall with the realization that she was indeed still alive, and the realization that though she could not at that time walk, read, speak properly or recall anything of her life, she would come to realize that since she was still alive, and could feel this nirvana, then logically others could do so.

Bolte Tayllor had described how the left brain is responsible for action and memory, while the right brain was the processor of the "here and now." Within her stroke-disabled body, she described feeling only a world of peaceful compassion in which she envisioned living people could control and dismiss left-brain calculations, to step to the right of their controlling left brain hemisphere to embrace a positive, humane world.

She described this particular stroke of insight into how we could lead our lives as what motivated her to recover...a process which took the work of eight long years to complete.

"Who are we? We are the light force power of the universe," she said, lauding the cognitive ability, humanity and manual dexterity she attributed to "50 trillion molecular geniuses" at work.

Little doubt, that was one of the grandest, most intense and most powerful beginnings of any TED conference, and, as Jill Bolte Taylor said of her own revelation, certainly worthy of TED's focus on "Ideas worth spreading."

iAB Annual:The Integrated Agency

Rob Norman is a funny guy. And his company is going through some serious thinking about how it organizes itself to meet client needs.

The director of the interaction group at WPP's GroupM - "the largest company you never heard of," according to IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg - Norman talked about the fundamental changes affecting the agency business overall, and his company in particular. Operating in 73 countries, the 16,000-employee GroupM does three things: Create, distribute, and measure advertising. But historically it's duplicated each of those functions in each country, and in both the analog and interactive worlds.

That duplication probably doesn't make much sense in an era where costs are increasing, and customers demand better integration. As a result, GroupM is consolidating a variety of functions worldwide to increase efficiency and customer response. And it's working hard to integrate the capabilities of WPP's 24/7 Media acquisition to provide a consistent technology layer as well.

That may have a lot of implications for competitors and others who have rolled up a variety of related but barely-integrated businesses. We may see a lot more of this kind of re-jiggering of organization and services in coming months.

But perhaps even more interesting is the company's ventures into the content business. By Norman's report, GroupM has well over $100 million invested in developing TV shows and other content, either in partnership with or in support of its customers. He maintains that where GroupM takes these kinds of risks, "putting skin in the game," his company should also participate in the upside from those investments.

We saw a similar perspective the day before from a marketer, Don Friedman, EVP & CMO of CA, who said on the "Coopetition" panel that his company commissioned a custom print publication, delivered directly to its top customers. Typically the province of media companies, the content business is hard for marketers and agencies, but because it's also a strong attractor - my mantra for years in publishing is "content-driven attention" - it also offers tremendous value for those who get it right. As we've heard time and again from speakers at the conference, the lines between players in the marketing ecosystem continue to blur.

gB

(Disclosure: IAB is a client of my company, Xigi Media)

IAB Annual: The New Digital Marketing Ecosystem

The Interactive Advertising Bureau is the trade group for online advertising. (They’re also a client.) Their job is to grow the online marketing ecosystem so that the number and percentage of marketing dollars continue to flow to the digital world.

The IAB's annual event was previously a smaller gathering for 150 or so of their members. This year, the Bureau took its membership offsite to the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs in

Phoenix

,

Arizona

(which the Demo conference briefly called home a few years back.) The event sold out at 400 attendees.

There's been a steady stream of interesting speakers talking about the ongoing dramatic changes in the ecosystem. I'll highlight just a few in subsequent posts. The net takeaway, though, is that this arena has hit an undeniable inflection point, where the ability to scale and integrate are becoming defining characteristics.

gB

Pre-TED: Kluster

In the run-up to this year's TED, BusinessWeek offers a preview into the future of extreme design, with a 21 year-old entrepreneur at its center.

gB

DLD08: Car Country

In a brief but dynamic presentation at this year's DLD conference in Munich, former SAP executive Shai Agassi offered a riveting vision of an entire country converted to electric cars – by the end of the next decade.

“I used to be the next CEO of SAP,” Agassi began. Driven in large part by his commitment to make a better world for his children, Agassi says he turned from that course to focus on the environment. As an entrepreneur, he saw the opportunity to disrupt one of the world’s largest markets: The relentless march to deliver oil into gas tanks. “Fifty percent of all the oil in the world is used to drive cars,” intoned Agassi. “The worst way we could use our oil is to burn it in our cars.” Yet according to Agassi, we pay $1.5 trillion – yes, with a T – at the pump each year.

However, he maintains, any attempt to change the economics of gasoline has to start with the “social contract” of a car. Agassi reeled off his understanding of the contract:  1) It’s my car. 2) I want it to go fast. 3) I need five seats. 4) I have to be able to afford to buy, drive, and be seen in the car. 5) I’m willing to stop 50 times a year, for 5 minutes or less, and go.

Agassi thinks that all of these are solvable through an innovative business model that changes the game – and the contract with the driver.
1) You own the car. You can buy it, paint it, sell it, trash it. But Agassi’s company owns the battery.
2) Electric cars go really fast – quicker than a comparable internal combustion version.
3) Five seats? No problem.
4) Gas can cost up to $4,000 per year, and Agassi projects his car will cost $15,000-$20,000. If you don’t have to pay for gasoline - and the repairs that come with an internal combustion engine - the car pays for itself in a few years.
5) Agassi believes it’s possible to put charging stations at every place you’d park a car in public. He also wants you to rent the battery – you drive into a service station, you swap it for another battery and keep going. “You don’t pay for the battery, you pay for the drive,” he says. “Like a cellphone.”

But where to start? Agassi believes you need an entire country as a showcase, to prove it can be done. First choice: Israel. Why?

• It’s a relatively small country: “If you go more than 200 kilometers, stop,” he says. “You’re going around in circles.”
• Drivers stay local. “If your car goes outside Israel, it’s been stolen.”
• Another incentive: Just in the past week, Agassi announced, Israel committed to dramatically reduce its dependency on oil in 10 years.

Agassi announced that Renault Nissan had just committed to manufacturing a car with Agassi’s design, for which $200 million has been raised to start the process – in part funded by holding companies for Israel’s oil market, which want a part of this new “e-gasoline” market, including putting in a half million charging stations at public parking slots.

Is it possible? It’s not likely to go as quickly as Agassi says. But if the will of an entire country can be geared toward this kind of “moon shot” goal, it can show others that this kind of large-scale commitment has a chance of success.

gB

Demo08: Reviewing the Godstream

This is what I get for catching a cold on the way home from Demo, and taking two days to pull my sorry carcass back to the keyboard to write up my notes.

They’ve been widely reported elsewhere, but the Demo Gods of 2008 are:

• BitGravity. Broadcast-quality video over the Web. Just go to their site, you’ll get it.
• Ecrio. Its MoBeam is a small keychain device that generates a light beam that looks like a barcode to a laser reader. Like a virtual coupon, the idea is to allow people to get offers from vendors – on their PCs, or locally by Bluetooth – and bring them to the point of sale. It’s a good idea – but it’s not clear why someone wouldn’t just want to get a barcode image on their cellphone, a device they’re already carrying around.
• Education.com. The company’s SchoolFinder clearly hit a nerve with the attendees, since any parent will tell you the school search process – especially in a big city – is an exercise in frustration. I’m hoping, however, that it will provide the right context for comments that will allow a healthy dialog between parents, educators, and administration: It’s far too easy for disgruntled parents to take potshots at a school without making it easy for faculty to respond.
• Flypaper. Drag-and-drop flash programs. Go to their site, create one, you’ll be amazed.
• Green Plug. The vision of a universal plug is a great one, especially because Green Plug’s approach could dramatically reduce power consumption. But it’s hard to see it gaining much traction without the backing of several major technology companies.
• LeapFrog. The venerable educational company’s Tag pen “reads” aloud from its specially-printed books. But the idea that you could exactly track your young kid’s reading – and match it against a map of what they “should” be reading at that age – creeps me out.
• Livescribe. If you don’t mind a fat pen, it’s pretty cool to hold a real computer in your hand – especially one that not only sends images to your PC, but can translate languages as they’re written.
• Sprout. Rich media widgets you can drop into your site. Some similarity to Flypaper.
• Vidyo. HD quality real-time video over cable modems. ‘Nuff said.
• Xtranormal. Didn’t see the demo, but Rafe Needleman did.

And the People’s Choice: atlaspost. I can see why they appealed to a populist crowd: James Chi, the company’s director of business development, had an infectious, upbeat tone in his presentation. “People are connecting more and more through social networks,” he asked, “but how do these connect to their social lives in the real world?” His answer: Using Google maps, let people add their own images and messages anywhere in the world. You can create a “personal atlas village,” either with your own pictures, or with static and moving images from the company’s own shopping mall. It’s a very clever, accessible offering – “Very successful in Taiwan!” claimed Chi - made all the more cheap and easy because it leverages Google’s map platform.

Four Non-Gods:

• I’m surprised that SupportSpace didn’t get more notice. It's not sexy, and there are many different talent platforms out there, but this is the first one I’ve seen that seems to get a number of things about tech support right. By ensuring that customers’ comments about techs are posted for all to see, it creates a more-perfect information space about support quality. They obviously need to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting lots of techs supporting lots of companies’ products. But they have a partner program that lets vendors control pricing and the expert pool, which may help them extend their reach. I wouldn’t necessarily say that “call centers will soon be extinct,” as they do, but I’d watch this company.
• Another strong entry is Ribbit. What the company didn’t make clear enough is that it’s really a platform, with thousands of developers who’ve used their API to create new Web phones and other utilities. (Full disclosure: a good friend of mine is an advisor to the company, which I only found out after I’d first posted about them.)
• I liked ROVE’s PCMobilizr, which allows users to edit files on a remote PC using their mobile device; it’s a reasonable approach to an interface that makes the tiny smartphone window halfway usable. You wouldn't want to do it often, but if you're desperate to access a remote PC, it's likely a good thing to have in your pocket.
• One small but interesting offering was Visible Measures, which provides information about online video viewership. Though the company might say it gives accurate information about how long people are viewing a video – what head of marketing Matt Cutler called “the engagement curve” -  it really tracks the length of time someone allows a video to run on their PC. Which is a little different: Someone could simply let a video play to completion, and it wouldn’t be clear if they’d actually watched it or not. Why is that important? If, say, people stopped watching before your ad or product showed up, that’s information you’d like to have. Not sure if I agree how likely this is, but more data about what people like and don’t might lead to better offerings.

gB