Conferenza

TED2009 - 'Catching Air' with Eureka, world's largest Zeppelin

Among the legendary gift bag shwag and door prizes at TED this year is a very special ride not available over North America for nearly three quarters of a century - a 12-person tour on Airship Ventures' Eureka,the world's largest and most modern Zeppelin.   

Originally, the 75 meter-long craft was scheduled to fly to Long Beach to circle over the TED conference and provide rides to TEDsters, including the door prize and a group of advisers to TEDprize winner Jill Tarter.  

But incoming storms late this week forced those plans to be abandonned.  

Instead, the company kindly offered me a flight over San Francisco Monday, including a thrilling three minutes circling 1000 feet above the Golden Gate, so I could provide photographs and film footage to TED.

The ship is the brainchild of husband-wife Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Alexandra Hall and Brian Hall, and arrived in late October in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it's housed at an airship hanger at Moffett Field, where the Navy's USS Macon and USS Akron were stationed in the mid-1930s.

The couple were inspired by a ride in a Zeppelin over Germany during the 2006 World Cup soccer championships, and the discovery of Zeppelin NT [New Technology], a new generation of rigid aluminum and carbon fiber airframes made in Friedrichshafen, Germany, the historic capital of Zeppelin construction.

The history of the airship and its journey from Germany to the United States are chronicled in the company's blog, here.  

Investors include frequent TEDsters Esther Dyson and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Investors

Because the airship did not make it to the LA area, which would have been its first non-transit tour to Southern California, the two-hour door prize flight will now be set in the Bay Area, for a similar tour as that pictured below.

 

Over Golden Gate, looking towards Marin.

Vessels travel under south end of Golden Gate Bridge.

 

The multi-billion dollar Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge, towards Oakland.

Downtown Oakland.

 

Palace of Fine Arts & Exploratorium.

Google-plex, with Solar PV atop roof.

 

Airship Ventures co-founder and CEO Alexandra Hall at the airship's broad rear window.

 

Eureka pilot Kate Board, the world's only female Zeppelin pilot.

Below: 

Gus Holweger, Community Ambassador for Airship Ventures, was raised in Friedrichshafen, Germany, the hometown of the Zeppelins of the 1930s, and the site of the current state-of-the-art production facilities for the Zeppelin NT:

{Photos by Sam Perry, courtesy of fellow TEDster Steve Elefant and the executives, investors and crew of Airship Ventures.}

Poster at Moffett Field HQ.

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.

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.

PopTech - the live feed

Note that PopTech is being webcast live... the list of speakers is here, and the schedule's here.

And, while we will be providing some thematic reports on themes across several of the speakers as well as updates on Pop!Tech's evolving community, several bloggers are providing live updates, including the typically wonderful, copious notes of Ethan Zuckerman.

Pop!Tech envisions Human Impact

Pop!Tech 2007 kicked off its annual feast of ideas amid the chill autumn folliage of downeast Maine with the incredible data visualization work of photographer Chris Jordan and the urban sensory mapping work of Christian Nold.

This year's theme, "Human Impact" was creatively visualized Jordan's work, which demonstrates in his Intolerable Beauty the patterns made by around 425,000 cell phones - the number tossed away by Americans every day, or 15 million sheets of paper, the amount used by Americans every five minutes, a phenomenon whose visualization he describes as allowing him to chronicle the detritis of human consumption.

His latest show, in LA, is "Running the Numbers" and turns such images into artwork - such as creating an image of Mount Denali comprised entirely of images of the badge of the "Denali" SUV, with some altered to spell "Denial" in the same typeface, and an image of two billion plastic bottles - the number used by Americans every FIVE minutes.

Nold showed how he used a sensory mapping device to record the emotional states over time and in various locations in Greenwich, England and San Francisco, California.

Follow the links above to see these works, and better understand how they provide true insights on the level of visualization visionary Edward Tufte.

Aspen's IdeasFestival-Independence Day Explores Fronteirs

July 4th was all about frontiers - new and old - at Aspen Institute's IdeasFestival.

The metaphor began with a dawn gathering at which Atlantic Monthly uber-journalist and now Shanghai resident Jim Fallows and China expert Orville Schell, the outgoing Berkeley dean of journalism, discussing the mindset of China as it seeks to balance autocratic political order with frenetic and chaotic 'wild west' pace of economic growth. In some ways, China's 'new frontier' has implicit to its momentum that the country may return to the global power status it once enjoyed, allbeit several centuries ago.

From there, the third annual IdeasFestival participants rocketed into a plenary session interview of Virgin's Sir Richard Branson by CBS newsman Bob Shieffer. The delightful wide-ranging interview sauntered from Branson's love of boating and ballooning adventures ["I love a challenge. There's an adventure streak in all of us," said Branson, reminding the audience he was fished out of the ocean no fewer than six times when his conveyances failed him], to launching of his businesses [Boeing told him, when he called about buying an aging 747 to start Virgin Atlantic, they'd be willing to strike a deal "so long as, unlike your name, your airline's going to 'go all the way!'"], to his Virgin Galactic Airways, which is building with Burt Rutan the 'mother ship' to launch tourists, including the Branson family, 70 miles out towards space.

Back down on earth, former George W. Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson invoked the image of the American frontier and rugged individualism characterized by the American West, while Democratic Congresman Rahm Emanuel (Illinois) countered the other legendary pioneering metaphor in America was the wagon train - a communal circling of wagons to protect and prosper. After a long era of leadership which may be characterized as invoking lone cowboy images, Emanuel, suggested, it may very well now be time to restore the more communitarian tradition.

Aspen, itself a one-time fronteir mining town reborn as a haven for the rich and regal, is encountering a few fronteir issues of its own. California Rep. Jane Harmon noted there is no remaining snow at one of the area's favored attractions, the Maroon Bells, for the first time in at least three decades. Environmental impacts, a reminder of the effect of global warming, also extended to the Rocky Mountain city's traditional fireworks display, which were moved for fear of fire from the side of Ajax Mountain to a golf course on the valley floor due to high heat and dryness.

Perhaps the most poinant line of a day celebrating the United States' declaration of independence from Britain came from Sir Richard Branson, speaking in a tent whose drapes were pulled open to offer glimpses of the peaks surrounding the idyllic Aspen meadows:

"I don't know why we ever lost this beautiful country. It was a big mistake."

Happy Holidays. More to come.

/sgp