Conferenza

SuperNova2008 - celebrates network science

Supernova launched its seventh edition here at the spiffy new "Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF" south of south of Market, in, well, Mission Bay. The conference, born in the midst of the Internet investment "winter" following the bursting of the bubble in 2000-2001, has been among our perennial favorites - edgy, open and full of dynamic format experiments.

In fact, this year's opening afternoon constitutes the main plenary session of the three day conference, allowing participants to delve into work groups for the next two days - reversing the format of some previous years and concentrating more on creative, participatory involvement.

This year's theme "Challenges for the new Network Age," is as appropriate as ever, since we are still in so many ways at the dawning of the consciously networked world.

"We aren't really wired to grock networks," notes Kevin Werbach, the founder and grand maestro of SuperNova, noting despite his own telecoms expertise, etc., we are still developing our understanding of network science, to some extent a discipline he notes hardly existed a decade ago.

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.

Off to DLD

Heading to DLD08 in Munich, produced by Hubert Burda Media and Dr. Yossi Vardi (for whom the "Yossi Scale" was named, for the "schmooze" value of a conference). Onboard the flight tonight are Silicon Valley residents such as Mark Benioff of Salesforce.com, and attending are folks like Barak Berkowitz, former CEO of Sixapart, and Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. I'll be arriving a tad late, missing the first afternoon, but posting some reports from those who'll have attended.

gB

AlwaysOn Summit: on McCain, Virtual Worlds and the Happiness of Venture Capitalists

We'll be providing coverage from Tony Perkins' 5th annual AlwaysOn Stanford Summit - allbeit delayed courtesy of our friends at United Airlines [to be sure, we're pleased they did not fly us off from the other coast with a failed flight control system [!] but a 24-hour delay was a bit extreme!].

This milestone year has the typical assembly of 100 startup companies seeking attention for their new products, panels of leading lights of Silicon Valley, and timely keynotes - all of which are loosely related, a bit like a tag cloud. Currently, Senator [and presidential candidate] John McCain is explaining his willingness to buck public opinion to keep pushing forward in Iraq.

"I would rather lose a campaign, than lose a war," he said, repeating his frequent assertion, while noting also that American forces today were facing temperatures of roughly 130 degrees Farenheit, wearing 40 pounds of equipment, and maintaining excellent morale.

"It's the most professional, it's the best equipped, it's the best trained and it's the most couragious in our history," he said, under questioning by Tony Perkins and one-time Ronald Reagan speach-writer Peter Robinson, who is now with the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Speaking despite recent concerns over his fundraising shortfalls and upheavals in which he many staff left and were dismissed to preserve funds, McCain said he would continue to run because "I am the most prepared."

He praised Silicon Valley for its recent green investments, saying climate change was no longer in dispute, and added that he would call on Silicon Valley executives to serve America "for free" in a McCain presidency.

Previously, Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale provided a tour of his Second Life virtual worlds, and predicted on a subsequent panel that processing power devoted to virtual worlds would exceed that on the web in general, arguing it made connections between people much more tangible and productive, without direct physical presence.

And Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley told a panel entitled "VCs: are you happy" that he did not consider the happiness of venture capitalists to be an issue attracting great sympathy, though as a contrarian he would consider great pessimism on venture returns to be a positive signal for investment.

More to follow.

Supernova2007 Sparkles with 'networked Energy

Kevin Werbach is doing it again... assembling his somewhat eclectic mix of bleeding edge technologists and tools with perrennial high tech visionaries like Doc Searls, Denise Caruso, Clay Shirky and David Weinberger and inside the beltway Washington policy wonks to create a thought-provoking blend of inspiration and realism...

One of Werbach's innovations - and each Supernova since the outset has tested new formats far more openly than other gatherings of this type - was to encourage more informal convenings around the general sessions.

This year, though we missed out on a Tuesday "unconference" attendees reported to have permitted some compelling deep discussion of a wide range of topics, we dropped in on Challenge Day - a robust set of more than a dozen panels and cameo presentations convened at the Wharton West Campus in downtown San Francisco, a day ahead of the main conference which begins this morning.

As with past years, the sessions were well attended and have been well covered in blogs on the conference's Conversation Hub website.

Under the theme "Defining the new network," Werbach sees this year's theme as defining what happens when everything is connected, in a distributed manner and across a range of modalities - and the 'preamble' sessions were a great way to connect into old friends, fellow-travelers, and to strike up new relationships, all the while in the proximity of some of the latest and greatest.

Some highlights we caught were...

+ The Relationship Economy - a wide-ranging if familiar conversation between Doc Searls and David Weinberger [a la The Cluetrain Manifesto which they co-authored with Christopher Locke and Rick Levine] and Jerry Michalski, who served as a gentle provocateur/moderator in exploring the extent to which companies and organizations still approach web technologies as "top down" broadcast mechanisms rather than truly engaging with their customers.

Doc Searls, who coined the phrase "markets as conversations", is still working with the nearly decade-old concept, and said a group of some 150 members has formed, holding weekly discussions on developing what one member dubbed "vendor relationship management" (aka Value Relationship Management) or VRM. This is the concept that an individual has a method to have greater control over relationships with the vendors and companies with which they interact, including when they want to shut down that connection altogether. Naked Conversations author Shel Israel noted this could work particularly well when planning a holiday - a traveler would like to read lots of material on a destination before the trip, and likely want it shut off immediately afterwards!

Weinberger, and audience participant Greg Wolf, noted this concept was in many ways diametrically opposed to the concept of CRM - or Customer Relationship Management, which forced sales people into narrow, mechanistic interactions with customers whose relationships are, and should be, richer than that.

Michalski noted the growth of the concept of User Generated Content as a marketing tool for consumer electronics, having spotted on a recent trip to Korea that cameras were being marketed with a symbol to denote them as being particularly good for that task. A discussion ensued on how many businesses were only superficial in their understanding of community generated content, in some cases simply seeking to subvert and coopt the conversations that may have been initiated in earnest.

Amid the discussions on information as a business's second most important asset [the first of course being its people], Michalski brought up the question of where that asset sits, while Weinberger noted that meta deta is the key asst, and Searls noted its how we can access and learn from the information which makes it valuable.

Other panels included Making Computers Smart: A Dumb Idea?, where Barney Pell of Powerset and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks debated, among other things, whether General Magic's vision of more than a decade ago of independent autonomus agents running on their own would come to fruition. Pell said they already were doing so, siting a new wave of mashup-enablign widgets like Yahoo Pipes and Proto, while Spivack argued the truly smart versions were likely still years away.

General Magic was also mentioned in a subsequent session, The Changing Forces in Advertising, where Technorati's Ted Shelton described how he expects corporations will wear out their apparent assumption that in past their customers were "too dumb" to use the internet, to recognizing that "the annuity of attention" via the web was far more compelling than traditional advertising.

A panel of angel and early stage venture investors moderated by Cathy Brooks, Entrepreneurship and Investing, provided some of the traditional optics for curious entrepreneurs, including some exceedingly frank assetions. "I don't work with unsophisticated angels," stated colleague Jeff Clavier, while legendary Angels investor Ron Conway said "far and away" his primary consideration for investment was "whether or not I think I'm going to enjoy working with that entrepreneur." Conway was also uncompromising in his support of Silicon Valley's continued pre-eminence: "I think the market's only going to get better. Silicon Valley's dominance is only going to get better, and this is going to contine to be the best place to start a company and invest in a company."

In a panel on "Virtual Life or Virtual Hype?" Raph Koster of Areae argued that virtual worlds ahve been around in text since the 1970s, and Rueben Steiger of Millions of Us described how his company had convinced Diagio to create a special, visual "bar" experience to promote its liquor products on second life, etc., while Clay Shirky described high attrition rates of virtual world sites, arguing this demonstrated their vulnerabilities, adding "I've never in my life bet against users...." Stieger and Koster countered that virtual worlds clientelle and usage continues to rise, with far larger opportunities to engage [and thus evidently to monetize] the most passionate users. Stieger argued in the none-too-distant future avid users will be buying $2 shoes and $100 shirts for their avatars.

The panel on Rewiring Politics did not hesitate to find fault with the state of internet savvy of present-day politicians. Andrew Rasiej, who 'centered' the panel and is founder of Personal Democracy Forum, framed the discussion a good deal with his assertion that, even having tried to run a campaign on his own, he was not able to get beyond the top-down political campaign associations that predominate in national campaigns right down to the the municipal level. Nonetheless, he did express hope tht using technology to create a more robust and participatory democracy might eventually break through this. JD Lasica did well to bring in attendee participation and references to civic undertakings, including Sanford Dickert's Political Gastronomica and PoliticalWarez sites, Greg Elan, who with Rasiej described how Sunlight Foundation is supporting Maplight.org in developing a federal data search engine for around $250,000 for which the government has allocated $15 million...

The day was capped by about a dozen individual 'challenges' - ideas presented by engaged entrepreneurs for audience feedback, among the most entising of which was Princeton Prof. Timothy Ferriss's description of how on a bet over a bottle of wine he outsourced an entire month of dating for $200. You had to be there. Or, you might read his book, which he gave out to admiring and appreciative attendees.

The full-fledged conference opens Thursday morning at 8:45 PDT. I'll be tuning in via one of the live* web-casts, while Gary Bolles writes from the real shabang.

Sounds like Mr. Werbach's calling "order" to start the first session as I write.

"Be Challenged. Be Provocative. Be Productive." is Werbach's catchphrase for today.

Get seated, and Enjoy!

/sp
*Please note - second link seems working well, with 25 viewers, while blogtv's cast reports having been stopped by sender.

Charlene Li at New Communications Forum

Forrester Research’s highly respected Charlene Li kicked off the second and final day of the second annual New Communications Forum at the Sheridan Palo Alto Hotel.  Like Rebecca Blood on the prior day, she was extremely well-received.

Li advised  corporate communications professionals who dominated the audience of 180 that they “have to let go of company-generated messaging, because technology is moving the power out of their hands and placing it at the fingertips of end users. This same ubiquitous connectivity is making geography irrelevant as it allows the easy formation of worldwide communities comprised of highly mobile individuals.

She showed Forrester Research data that corroborated earlier-released statistics from the Edelman Trust Barometer that indicated people trust their peers more than any other group, certainly more than designated corporate spokespeople. The implication might help explain the extraordinary power of the blogosphere, where endorsement—and criticism—comes from people like ourselves, rather than out-of-work actors or paid communications professionals.

“The result is that the firms are becoming irrelevant,” she said. “Brand loyalty is dropping. “

Defining “social media” as a social structure in which technology puts power into communities, not institutions,” she counseled companies to benefit from it by giving customers what they want. As one example she discussed a Forrester client, US Cellular who started a blog to find out what customers wanted and discovered what annoyed users most was paying for minutes when someone called them.  The result as they started offering an unlimited inbound service option which has proven popular.

She noted that peer-to-peer communities are forming that are selling goods, content and services that completely bypass corporations, which have historically enjoyed a top-down position in any marketplace positions.

An observation we had not previously heard, which we think may have huge repercussions over the longterm was that the social media are building communities that have greater loyalty to each other than to their own governments, a view that strikes a chord at our own blogging experience.

She also estimated that 11 percent of North Americans are reading blogs, a number that  nearly double one we heard less than three months ago.

The conference wound up at 2 pm yesterday.We'll have our wrap up shortly.

TED - Halftime Report

Since assuming the stewardship of TED - Technology Entertainment Design - Chris Anderson and his Sapling foundation have
accentuated the humanitarian opportunities to leverage design, entertainment and technology to profoundly improve the world and the human condition.

This year's convocation has become the most seemless integration of the four-day, $4,400, 1,000+ participant extravaganza with noble causes which could truly and literally save humanity.

Under the mantle "The Future We Will Create," TED2006 is taking Chris's vision to a new level while deepening the conference's associations with influential long-time TEDsters like the partners of venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Byers & Caufield and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and the founders of high tech blockbuster companies like Kleiner-backed Google and Amazon.

The main highlights of the first half of the conference were unquestionably Wednesday evening's 'Bonus Session' with former Vice President Al Gore on the coming global crisis from climate change, and the distribution Thursday evening of the three TEDprizes, whose winners each was allowed to make one 'wish' to be granted by the TED community:

- Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity to generate radically improved designs for cost-effective shelter, desires a community to embrace open source design for improving living standards for all,

- Jehane Nojaim, the documentary film-maker whose film "Control Room" explored the U.S. war in Iraq and coverage of the conflict by al-Jezeera television network, wishes to bring the world together on one day every year through the power of a simultaneous screening of film and

- Dr. Larry Brilliant, the public health maverick who played a leading role in eradicating Smallpox, wants help building a powerful new early warning system "to protect the world form some of its worst nightmares," including Avian flu.

Brilliant arrived at TED immediately after being named to head Google's charitable foundation, also played a key role recently in helping the venerable venture firm Kleiner Perkins establish a $200 million fund dedicated to preventing pandemics and reducing their potential impact.

Kudos to play-by-play session reports by our friend Bruno Giussani, who produced the more intimate TEDglobal event at Oxford, England, last July.

Session One - History's Arrow - Demographic Directions and glimpses at Future Scenarios [hint: we may want to wake up, strap on seatbelts, and consider avoiding catastrophe].

Session Two - [Don't Hold your] Sharp Intake of Breath - of which the troupe of delighting [HIV/AIDS-orphaned] Ugandan dancers totally rocked TED.

Day One Bonus Session - Al Gore.

Session 3 - Small Miracles.

Session 4 - Links within a Flattened World,

Session 5 on Pastor Rick and Skeptics,

and, of course,

TEDprize Winners.

At the end of Day Two, Anderson also announced TEDglobal 2007 will be held in Tanzania June 3-6 - presuming of course we're not strickent by a global pandemic, a surge in global warming, a conflagration of international strife, etc.

Why Blog Conferenza?

I began blogging in 2003 for the same reason I started writing for Conferenza in 2001.  After a break of nearly 30 years, I wanted to reestablish my credentials as a writer.  My hope was to eventually get picked up as a reporter/editor for a business magazine or prominent newspaper.

It didn't turn out that way.  For one thing, I picked about the worst period in history to try to work as a journalist.  In the past five years more than 100,000 of them have been laid off. The advertising has moved in huge chunks onto the Internet as have a great many readers. 

But, late in 2001, when Gary Bolles, Conferenza's co-founder and  sat down to create a new subscription-based newsletter covering top tier technology conferences, these trends were not that clear.  We decided to provide absolute quality converge, which just about everybody seems to agree we accomplished.  But more than that, we wanted to represent the eyes, ears and voice f the audience.  We went through a great deal of effort to know what attendees had to say and to accurately reflect the conversations we had with significant portions of the people present at an event.

Which very much brings us to blogging. I began just so I could exploit myself as a writer. In the beginning it was all about me telling you how talented I was. But that's not what happened.  In a short period of time, I was learning more than I was teaching.  I was having conversations with all sorts of people on all sorts of topics all over the world. Then I had the good fortune to team up with Robert Scoble to co-author a soon-to-be-published book called Naked Conversations. It was a mind-boggling experience.  I began merely as a reporter, with Robert as the heart and soul of it. I began to realize the disruptive power of blogging.

At conferences, I would take copious notes that at earliest, would be published a week after the event. Sitting next to me were a new generation of citizen journalists who were publishing as I sat there. While I will maintain that Conferenza's newsletter was always more comprehensive than any blogger's post, I would argue that Gary, our correspondents--Sam Perry and Richard Brandt--and I offered the wisdom of seasoned veterans, there simply is no way that we could compete with the collective wisdom of the crowds of bloggers in the room. Unlike the press, these guys didn't compete--they collaborated. They got questions from readers thousands of miles away in realtime, and answered them in seconds. At PC Forum, in 2003, bloggers would play the catalyst role in the eventual indictment of ex-Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio.

If we can't beat the blogger in the conference room, we might as well join them. I am convinced that readers can better be served with a blog than a newsletter.  This year, Gary and I will run parallel courses, publishing both the newsletter and this blog. We will start with Demo early next month.  The readers will decide our ultimate course. So will advertisers and sponsors.  This blog welcomes them--even conferene producers, so long as you know we will continue to judge your events with the same hard eye, we have always used.

The Conferenza Weblog is an experience for now.  Please visit often and tell what you think. Help guide us in this new course.