Traveling Geeks

5 Important Issues From 5 TEDxBerkeley Speakers: Help Us Pave the Way

As a co-curator of a TEDx event, you have a joyful honor of bringing important issues you want to see brought to the table…to the table, or in this case, a TEDx stage. Having been involved in the curation process at TEDxBerkeley for a few years now, there are speakers and writers I’ve met along the way who have haunted me — positively and negatively — the latter often provacative enough that regardless of whether it’s a pretty story, you know the story must be told.
Personal issues that keep me awake at night include the ugly embrace of processed food, climate change & the implications for wildlife and the world, the growing divide between the rich and the poor, our sad state of healthcare and education, and women’s inequalities. There are countless others, but there’s only so much that can absorb my already noisy back channel at any given time.
At TEDxBerkeley this year, we were able to bring some of those conversations to attendees.
I have always wanted Robert Neuwirth to
speak at TEDxBerkeley ever since I first heard him speak at PopTech a
few years ago. He is best known for his work with squatter communities
and poverty. He wrote Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World, a book describing his experiences living in squatter communities in Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul and Mumbai.  
He
brings us on a journey to West Africa and how locals came up with a
creative way to source their own energy when the government couldn’t.

Lagos residents use energy conservation. In his time in Lagos, he saw
people get their water in large canisters not from fresh water sources
or private wells. The Lagos government claims that it provides safe
drinking water in sufficient quantities to its people, according to a
newspaper he read on his way out of the country and yet, its far from
reality. There is no real functioning water system in Lagos and other
things are not efficient either. Apparently they waste N1.5 billion by
leaving their computers on standby.
The electrical company in
Nigeria was originally called NEPA, which the people refer to as “Never
expect power always.” On a future trip, Robert noted that the name had
been changed to PHCN, which locals now refer to as “Problem has changed
name.” He says, “Lagos is the only city I’ve been ever been to where
people have generator envy. It’s a home grown system that isn’t
licensed. We can argue about their efficiency and so forth, but this is
how Lagos gets electricity.”

Because of these
issues, the Lagos government decided to privatize electricity and raised
$156 million from private vendors who want to run the system and still,
nothing has changed. This is a great example of where people
organically get together to solve a problem when government isn’t able
to.  

Yet, privatization
isn’t going to magically transform a system that couldn’t provide
electricity to its citizens. If they hugely invest in a generation,
we’re gong to need more money from the consumer and privatization
doesn’t bring anything better to the consumer. More importantly, they
don’t have the kind of democracy that talks this out.

Robert
also talked about other initiatives there, where a marketplace was
literally knocked down by Kai (the Kick Against Indiscipline squad) with
no notice and no relocation because it was deemed a rough and dangerous
place.  
The
mayor has a plan for a kind of urban, mega city. He wants it to be the
African Dubai, pointing to Dubai as his model. Apparently, there is a
substantial cadre of Nigerians who feel that way.  These decisions are
designed to make them look better to the outside world yet of course, it
needs to be more rational.

Kim Polese was the opening speaker for this year’s theme of Catalyzing Change. In alignment with the theme, she addressed the communications gap
between education providers and students. Students don’t know what
courses to take so they can succeed in the 21st century.
Our challenge is to preserve the excellence and transform old curriculum she says. “We face a new crisis, the skills gap, which is a crisis which is affecting everyone so we need a revolution in the teaching model, a few of which are MOOC (massive online open courses) and passive
versus active participants in online open courses (small online
classes) in SPOCS, Small Private Online Classes.
The revolution is not
about cutting costs, it’s about this new transformational learning model
that is more engaged and also it allows for mass distribution to more
people. Only 50% of undergraduates receive a degree in six years. Moreso
than that, 55% of students need remediation.
The typical student
attends multiple universities, which equates to lost dollars and time
because so much of the credits don’t transfer over. Often, a student
takes “on average” over a year of credits they wouldn’t need to take.
One idea:
What if we offered and made those transfer of those credits seamless?
Think about what Visa did to revolutionize the credit business, by
swiping a card and it just works. If we standardize undergraduate
classes so the credits can be applied as seamlessly as a Visa card is
used today to pay for products and services.
The STEM gap
(science, technology, engineering and math) aka rouhgly 33% of students who just felt
that they weren’t prepared enough is widening……in the U.S., we lag behind most
developed countries.
Five out of every new jobs will be in STEM
related jobs in the next decade and yet we’re lagging behind countries
like Singapore, France and other developing countries. If we just
focused on increasing the number of STEM graduates by 10% can produce
75,000 more STEM graduates by the end of the decade, which is close to
what Obama’s goal is for higher education.
Women are turning away
from computing, the percentage at its all time high was 34% and now its
down to below 15%. The first programmers were women. During World War
II, the army recruited a group of women out of the University of
Pennsylvania to calculate bolistic trojectories and they called these
computers women. She refers to the work of TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra.
Known for his work in education research, Sugata Mitra won $1 million TED Prize to build his School in the Cloud.
Many who keeps tabs on education will know him for his project called “Hole in the Wall”,
an experiment he conducted in 1999, where Mitra and his colleagues dug a
hole in a wall near an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an
Internet-connected PC and walked away.
Over time, while a hidden
camera filmed the area, the video showed children from the slum playing
around with the computer and in the process, teaching themselves now
only how to use it themselves, but sharing that knowledge with their
friends.
His goal is lofty – he invited the world to embrace child-driven learning by setting up something he refers to as Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs). He asked for help designing a learning lab in India, where children can “embark on intellectual adventures.”

Second in the session was Eden Full who
is the Founder of Roseicollis Technologies Inc. She studied for two
years at Princeton University and is currently taking gap years to work
on her start-up full time after being selected for the inaugural class
of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship. Named one of the 30 under 30 in
Forbes’ Energy category two years in a row and Ashoka’s Youth Social
Entrepreneur of the Year, Eden founded Roseicollis Technologies Inc. to
take her solar panel tracking invention called the SunSaluter to
developing communities and established markets that need them.
The
SunSaluter won the Mashable/UN Foundation Startups for Social Good
Challenge and was awarded the runner-up prize at the 2011 Postcode
Lottery Green Challenge. While at Princeton, Eden initiated and curated
TEDxPrincetonU. Proudly Canadian, she was born and raised in Calgary,
Alberta. After coxing for the Princeton lightweight women’s team, Eden
was selected to be the coxswain for the 2012 Rowing Canada’s senior
women’s development team, where they won a gold medal at Holland Beker
and the Remenham Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta, beating the
German Olympic boat.
She shared her story about her patent-pending
solar invention called SunSaluter which she has been using in East
Africa. Provided extra electricity every day for one 60W panel to
charge, plus not just the benefit of getting extra water but clean to
people every day. She tested it out in a polit in Nyakasimbi Tanzania
and thereafter with a partner in Kirindi Uganda. The goal is deploy 200+
units to 15,000+ villagers.

Curt L. Tofteland
is the founder of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars
(SBB) program. During his 18 years of work with Shakespeare in
corrections, he facilitated the SBB/KY program at the Luther Lucket
Correctional Complex, producing and directing 14 Shakespeare
Productions.
“It is within the silence that we discover
the absence of self,” he said to TEDxBerkeley audience, as he opened
with lines from Shakespeare. “We arrive in this world, naked and alone
and we leave this world, naked and alone; we take with us our memories
and we leave behind our deeds,” he says reading a story that addressed
life issues such as dealing with truth and ego.
His work in
teaching Shakespeare to prisoners over the years was turned a movie and
he also teamed up with filmmaker/director/producer Robby Henson and
playwright Elizabeth Orndorf to create Voices Inside/Out – a 10-minute
playwriting program at the Northpoint Training Center in Burgin,
Kentucky. The program  has generated inmate authored plays that have
been professionally produced at Theatrelab, an Off-Off-Broadway theatre
in New York City.

Erica Wides from Let’s Get Real Show proceeded
to take the TEDxBerkeley crowd into the world of “real food,” versus
processed food, which has become the predominant food Americans eat
today.  She says, “artificial
has redefined the original. As Americans, we don’t even know what real
food anymore.
Food has become a hobby or fetish for some of us, it’s
become another utility like gas or electric of a real booty call.” She
asserts that we don’t really know where real food comes from anymore,
and that the
“foodie elite” is sending out the wrong message, about things they
don’t even care about.
The elite want people to care about whether food
is seasonable or organic. It’s now how mainstream America thinks she
says, who throws out examples of how they “do think:” Where is the
protein bar ranch? Is the gold fish in my gold fish crackers farmed or
caught? Why should I spend time to get real organic meat when I can get
an alternative for less than half the price?
How
do you know what real food is in the first place? In your grandmother’s
day, eating organic real food didn’t make you elite, keeping your teeth
after the age of 50 made you elite.  
The
US has the one third of the world’s excess weight. Erica says with a
sense of wit and humor that brings over 1,000 people to tears laughing:
we’re becoming the cute potato people from the movie Wally. Even my home
town of New York City, who was a thin walking city now has to widen its
subway seats for people.
As
for what’s real? If it grows or flies, it’s food. If you cook it at
home to bake it into a pie its real food. If that food goes off to a
factory to get processed before it gets to you, its not real food; its
what I call “Foodiness.” People are convinced that this is real food. Foodiness recasts the supermarket products as real food when it’s not real food.
If
we expect everyone to grow bees, grow their own fruit trees and go to
organic markets, they’ll just keep eating protein bars and gummy snacks.
 
While real
food might be really inconvenient it’s important to recognize that
cancer and heart disease is even more convenient when we don’t eat or
live well. The only way to make a sea change is for the elite to think
like them. In other words, says Erica, “we need to get the scooter
riders to stir fry rather than Kentucky fry.” 

TEDActive: Bubble Guns & Global Conversations on Lawns & Haystacks

As a long time TEDster, I had never been to its offshoot, an event that happens simultaneously every year called TedActive. It’s essentially TED, but less expensive without the bells and whistles.

 
Since it is held a couple of hours from the main event, the speakers are obviously not on-site, however you do experience them through a satellite feed, which includes views of the audience, the main stage and the impact the speakers have on that audience in real time.
For years, TED has something called the ‘simulcast’ room, which is where you can view the talks in a separate room on a ‘screen’ not far from the main room.

Why some people love hanging out in the ‘simulcast room’ rather than the main room is that it allows them to quietly chat in the back, or type away on their keyboard if they have work to get done.
OR, if you’re an A++ type who is simply too digitally connected to sit still with nothing but an old fashioned notebook among 1,000 of your “closest” friends, simulcast is the way to go.
TEDActive is a bit like that, except that the main room resembles TED’s main simulcast room and TEDActive’s additional simulcast rooms, which are even more casual, feel like a cross between a silent and creative experiment at a progressive university and an adult’s playground.
In some of the rooms, there were tables with paper cut outs and magic markers if you wanted to jot down your ideas in “color” using “scraps”. This year, they also had a ‘banana’ theme and while I still don’t know what was behind it, its oddly amusing to continuously bump into two guys who don’t know each other and yet both of their lives are entrenched in bananas.

 Snakeoil Cocktail mixologist Michael Esposito whipped up some drinks for the crowd late in the eveing, as bodies migrated towards the pool and hot tubs in the rear. 

From bananas and spirited drinks to cut outs and designs, we moved to species and the Internet in a nano-second.
An idea was thrown out there by four respected illumaries in different fields: Diana Reiss, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershefeld and Vint Cerf. The question was: could the internet also connect us with dolphins, apes, elephants and other highly intelligent species?
In a bold talk, the four of them came together to launch the idea of the interspecies Internet. 

When you’re having a moment where you don’t believe all things are possible, you remind yourself that you’re at TED and they are.
There was a ‘creative’ lab’ where Andy Cavatorta set up an exhibit that combined technology, robotics and music.

In that same space, a few of us were inspired to get creative at a 2 am brainstorm, with nothing better to do than sip martinis, eat blueberries with M&M’s and talk science fiction to the boy next door.

Did I mention that I’m a sucker for fur vests and 3D science fiction glasses? 

There was a l’il creative energy at the final ‘pool party’ as well including hats, squirt guns, wild handbags, pants, shoes and a whole lotta grass for some R&R, sunscreen and bubbly whatever.

Speaking of grass, we also had a little lawn time with TED 2013 Prize Winner Sugata Mitra. Known for his work in education research, Mitra won $1 million TED Prize to build his School in the Cloud. 
He invited the world to embrace child-driven learning by setting up something he refers to as Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) and asked the TED audience for help designing a learning lab in India, where children can “embark on intellectual adventures.”

While people were expanding their creative “juices” in whatever way they could, creative “things” were in place at the lab for people to play with and take in…

Below is a fabulous woman I chatted with who ‘wore’ her commitment to eco-living and seemed to have a different name each day.

One of the things I loved about TedActive was its combination of youthful and international energy. Below, I’m with the curator of TEDx Bordeaux Emmanuelle Roques.  
With 72 countries on-site, I had ‘curious’ conversations invoking global perspectives with folks from India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Kenya, South Africa, Australia, England, Holland, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, China, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Chile, Colombia, Canada, Malta, Lebanon, Palestine, UAE, Turkey, Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, Ireland, Israel, Belgium and Uganda.
And, those are only the ones that immediately popped into my head without diving into my business cards or the TED mobile app.

This global flare brings a different dynamic into the mix and overall, there were a lot less millionaires, no A+ celebrities and probably no billionaires.
If you want to go to TED for the latter, then the Active experience may not be the right ticket, but if you want to go to stretch your brain, get new ideas, be inspired, get your creative juices flowing, get off the grid for five days and have ‘unique’ conversations that make you think differently, then give it a shot.
Personally, there is always someone I know on the main TED stage every year, often more than one, and many more people I have known, worked, played and cried with for years attend the main event. The other thing you’re more likely to get at the main TED event is an overdose of “intellectual high.”
Comedian Julia Sweeney had the audience in stitches as she made references to her peeps, you know, the Nobel Prize Winners, Scientists, Authors & Inventors that were part (so not) of her everyday world from TED.

Accolades and titles aside, I’ve never been one for labels and titles: none of them — celeb labels, CEO labels, soup labels, hair product labels or shoe labels.
Sometimes I may be in a $25 t-shirt from Loehmanns and other times, it may be a great deal from some Italian or French designer I won’t remember the name of a week later I picked up in a West Village boutique. I must admit, being more “designer and accolade savvy” would certainly make the Oscars easier to watch.
While we’re talking about great design, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a shot of some of Yu Jordy Fu’s fabulous design work.

Later, a random encounter led to an interview with Upstart Business Journal’s Teresa Novellino, a TED virgin, over lunch. See her article here, which takes an entrepreneurship angle. I wouldn’t call myself a groupie, but I am most certainly a fan of what TED represents: spreading great ideas, innovation, inspiration and helping the world become a better place through a collective effort.
I’m a huge advocate of the in the between stuff that happens before and after all the organized formalities that events “do,” to throw people together. When there’s space and time and the ‘tossing’ is cast aside, real magic happens. Incredible dialogues happen. Life changing observations form. Relationships emerge. New initiatives are created.
And, as a result, ‘collective’ conversations away from your ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ conversations in your daily worlds, make you think about the world differently.
In that moment, an idea sizzles, or more importantly, an old way of thinking gets shattered which brings me to an oldie but a goodie, one of my favorite Helen Keller quotes:
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we don’t see the one opening before us.” -Helen Keller
I had another observation from hanging out with such a global ‘tribe’ over the course of five days. The early American “drive” seems to be getting replaced by more of a laissez faire attitude that no longer involves self ignition. See my write-up on Rescue America, a book released last year by Chris Salamone, that fixates on this shift.
Full of historical and philosophical references, he creates clear and specific connections between the loss of our founding values and the current challenges facing our nation. What is necessary, he suggests, is a fundamental shift back toward a national embodiment of the three primary leadership qualities that sustain all lasting human institutions: gratitude, personal responsibility, and sacrifice.
What I noticed at TedActive was how many people showed up from other parts of the world embracing all three.   
The notion that the “west” knows how to lead is something Americans do incredibly well – there’s no boundaries since they’ve been taught that hard work and education pays off. In other parts of the world, boundaries are overcome through great sacrifice and taking personal responsibility to change the status quo.
TED speakers and attendees from other parts of the world are great examples of where and how they embrace gratitude, personal responsibility and sacrifice in their daily lives.
Take a look at this year’s Yu Jordy Fu, who is not afraid to push boundaries, incorporating “raw beauty” and “love” into her design, art and architecture. 

OR, how violinist Ji-Hae Park uses her music to reach people’s hearts. “There are no boundaries,” says Ji-Hae Park on the TED2013 stage. While TED may be a lofty place to perform, she also plays at prisons, hospitals and restricted facilities. She talks about her time when she was depressed and how changing your perspective through music transformed how she viewed music but life itself.

OR, how Lakshmy Pratury with tears in her eyes, talked about the importance of keeping the Delhi rape alive, also reminding us that theres a new kind of revolution happening in India where the youth is breaking down the concept of a leader.

OR, how Hyeonseo Lee made sacrifices to get her family out of North Korea. As a woman who saw her first public execution at age 7, she endured a famine in the 1990s, one which killing an estimated million people. At the time, she didn’t have the frame of reference to understand the government repression going on around her but was later caught by the Chinese police.

Someone had accused her of being North Korean, and she was subjected to brutal tests of her ability to speak Chinese. Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China, sent back, tortured, imprisoned, publicly executed, and now she is in Long Beach talking to thousands of people who can make a difference with their voices, blogs, connections, social media call outs and their wallets.
Then, there’s the Ugandan artist & teacher Ruganzu Bruno Tusingwire, who I hung out with at TedActive. He became the first City 2.0 Award recipient of 2012 in Doha Qatar, at the TEDxSummit, which I attended last April. 
Tusingwire’s big idea is to use waste materials to create a movable amusement park for children living in slums of Kampala.

He is using his award to grow his community, grow an woman eco-artist loan program already supporting 15 women to develop their business ideas, and expand the amusement park from a single plane-shaped sculpture made of recycled plastic bottles into a permanent park. I loved his energy, not to mention his visible sense of sacrifice, personal responsibility and gratitude. 
Another interesting international ‘observation’ was what was absent and what was wasn’t. A latin band played on one of the nights and I was astonished that my partners on the dance floor were not Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean or Peruvian, but German, French, Middle Eastern and Italian.
In fact, the Best Dancer Award for TEDActive from a ‘partner perspective’ goes to Mohammed Abu Zeinab from Qatar who is apparently half Palestinian and half Lebanese. Go figure…and he rocked it to Latin music of all things.
P.S. he even wore funky clothing the rest of the week.

TED reminds you that nothing in your world is really aligned the way you ‘think it should be.’
It made me wonder what Wallace Stegner, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy and Doris Lessing would make of TED talks. Would they even be able to make sense of our over digitized world?
Someone who can make sense of it is AutoDesk’s Jonathan Knowles who showed up for half of TedActive, wearing fabulous, fun and bright colored socks.
Having just migrated from PC to Mac, I was somewhat sad and somewhat ecstatic that our conversation would end up being largely tech support in nature. Two hours later, I was fully equipped with Mac tricks and tips, though I’m still far less efficient on a Mac than I was on my old trusty Lenovo. That said, thanks to Jonathan for his patience, humor and persistence.  
I couldn’t help but get a chuckle over one of his tweets shortly after he arrive in Palm Springs.
Lunch at #TED2013 versus Lunch at #TEDActive #maybeExaggerateAbit: pic.twitter.com/IV3PoVIG8J 

Although excessive, I must admit, we did in fact have a lawn party with picnic baskets, sandwiches and cookies in 80 degree sunshine, the last time we’ll likely do such a thing given that TED’s new location is in Canadian Vancouver and Whistler next year.

Occasionally, you hang out with people you know and work with: below with Andrew Carton of HAPILABS.

On the last night of TED, I headed back to Long Beach to have drinks and dinner with old friends and musician Amanda Palmer who performed this year, showed up and shared a few tunes with our intimate group, something which has become tradition for as long as I can remember. (the dinner part, not the Amanda part)

And at the end of the evening, there’s always room for a little girl bonding or whatever the hell we do that makes us feel feminine and human and connected and just fabulous being together.

International flavors came out once again as Reggie Watts killed it on stage at the end of Ted Active with new sounds I hadn’t heard before from him. I remain a fan!
Suddenly I found myself lifted up into the crowd and then over it, my body being passed from hands to hands….a remarkable experience especially when you realize that each set of hands are likely from a different continent.
How cool I thought as I looked beyond the crowds below me as people bumped together, swaying to the hypnotic music that extended beyond us into the lofty palms that give Palm Springs its name.
Behind me were the non-swayers sipping drinks and networking in their respective courtyard corners. In the foreground, I spotted Jill Sobule not far from the stage, and then there was Reggie performing in all his ecletic glory, surrounded by a fusion of pinks and hazy midnight hues and I wondered for a moment if it was all just a dream.

Also see some of my individual blog posts from TED 2013 this year, including:

Four Ted Speakers Who Appeal To Our Sensory Selves
TED2013 Prize Winner Sugata Mitra’s Wish for Education: “School in the Cloud”
Ugandan Ruganzu Bruno Tusingwire Empowers & Engages Children Through PLAY
Brazilian Photographer Sebastiao Salgado Shares His Story at TED2013 
Rad Hip Gardener Ron Finley Wants to Greenify Inner City Neighborhoods 
Saskia Sassen on the Value of Imperfect & Incomplete Cities at TED2013 
Inspiration at TED2013: From Music & Healing to Endangered Species & Mobile Electric Vehicles
Dan Pallotta: Think About a Charity’s Deams, Not Their Overhead 

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Photo Credits: All visibly on-stage photos of speakers from the Ted Blog, the shot of Renee and Emmanuelle taken by Teresa Novellino, Yu Jordy Fu with her artwork shot from her site, all other shots by Renee Blodgett. 

MBA or Not in the New Digital Age?

The Wall Street Journal has a great piece that suggests an alternative route to the traditional MBA. In other words, imagine that you have the option to go somewhere prestigious on paper, such as Harvard or Stanford for your MBA and can spend time with other go-getter types among ivy-covered buildings and high-powered faculty for a couple of years.  

Photo credit: Brian Stauffer
Yet, after you’re out the door, who would a progressive CEO rather hire? the candidate who built a profitable business in two years, or the candidate who sat in lectures? They suggest that a ‘smart investor’ would skip the MBA candidate.

The piece suggests that what matters “exponentially more than that M.B.A. is the set of skills and accomplishments that got you into business school in the first place. What if those same students, instead of spending two years and $174,400 at Harvard Business School, took the same amount of money and invested it in themselves? How would they compare after two years? If you want a business education, the odds aren’t with you, unfortunately, in business school. Professors are rewarded for publishing journal articles, not for being good teachers.”
Read the original article here.

The Pain of Upgrades: Migrating from a Lenovo to a MacBook Pro

My laptop is dying a slow horrible death. The fan
is howling and all sorts of unknown noises are coming from in its hardware
interior.
It’s a Lenovo, my second over an eight year period. We all knew the
day was coming.
“We” is anyone and everyone who has stopped by my
office or seen me using it at an event. They’d hover over me and remark: I can’t believe how slow your machine is, yowsa – how do you get anything
done?
The thing is…I’ve only had it for four years and it’s been on its way out
for half of those four.
It seems as if I grew up in a world with
different standards. The thought of a piece of machinery you paid $2,500 for with
all the bells and whistles dying within a few years wouldn’t be acceptable…it’s absurd and yet we’ve all been brainwashed into thinking it’s not.

Manufacturers and reviewers alike are both to blame for creating such a consumable world where
we’re constantly shelling out more money for more reliable hardware, which it should have been reliable in the first place.

My refrigerator didn’t cost that much nor did the stove in my kitchen
and yet both have been purring along for more than a decade. I paid $300 for a
car once that lasted longer than my laptops do today and it’s likely that some
old guy somewhere in Maine probably is still using it for trips to the grocery
store.
When someone sees my two year old iPhone, they look at me as if
I’m as outdated as the guy who’s driving that old Oldsmobile. A few friends
are trying to get me to upgrade my four year old 24 inch Samsung flat
screen monitor when it works perfectly fine.
Call it old fashioned wisdom of sorts, or just common sense, but
who said, “if it works, don’t mess with it?” Oh yeah, that was my
grandfather, not Winston Churchill or Steve Jobs.
When I ask “why upgrade?” I’m told there’s better
pixels, faster speeds or I’m bound to have compatibility issues.
While Windows 8 is now available, consumers are forced to pay an
extra $100 for Windows 7, now outdated. It’s the exponential growth thing
haunting my every day, the pressure of keeping up with the speed at which
technology is accelerating not to mention the pressure we all have financially
of trying to keep up with it all too.
Silicon Valley tells me to ‘get over it,’ and just upgrade, but
Silicon Valley doesn’t live in the real world where salaries are one fifth of
what they are elsewhere in the country and that’s if you aren’t one of the 20 something
year olds who made an exit from a not so innovative of an app that got
sold to someone with more money than brains.
eMarketer made a 2012 tablet sales prediction of 81.3 million
tablets, up from 15.7 million in 2011, and Gartner estimates that sales will
multiply to 54.8 million in 2011 and more than 208 million by 2014.
Forrester numbers have laptop sales continuing to grow from 26.4
million in 2010 to 38.9 million in 2015, however, while desktop PC sales will
decline from 20.5 million in 2010 to 18.2 million in 2015. Mobile is hot and we’re
all moving to smaller form factors – the trends make sense.
Take a look at research firm Canalys figures: they have
vendor shipments of smartphones close to 489 million smartphones in 2011,
compared to 415 million PCs. Smartphone shipments increased by 63% over the
previous year, compared to 15% growth in PC shipments.
While mobile will win at the end of the day, the need for laptops
and in some cases desktops isn’t going away tomorrow, although some will argue
they can do nearly everything they need to on their iPad. While I use one,
particularly when I travel, my efficiency on the thing is less than half what
it is on a power laptop, even my poor dying Lenovo.
While many of my laptops over a decade have died a slow horrible
death, some of them still turn on…..they’re just not usable. As I took a
hardware account, I was shocked by the list, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been! Two
HPs, a mini HP, a baby MSI wind notebook I bought for a trip to Africa, a
Toshiba, an Acer, two IBM/Lenovos and a partridge in a pear tree. 
  

The power chords are out of control because none of them are
compatible with each other, even the ones made by the same manufacturer. The
result? A digital me and a digital life that doesn’t make things more efficient and yet productivity is the #1 thing I need these devices to deliver me and my
business.
The advancements in the last decade are remarkable. For those who
argue that the Singularity isn’t on its way, they might want to pause and
reflect on just how fast things are moving and that it’s more difficult than
ever to keep up with the advancements being thrown our way.
Clearly I’m not a luddite and I love shiny new cool gadgets and
toys as much as much as my fellow geeks; remember that next week I’m off
to CES for the umpteenth year in a row.
Yet, we need to remind ourselves that technology is an enabler; it needs to enhance our lives not be a hindrance to a more fulfilling
life. Dealing with technology glitches, whether that be hardware or software,
is something I deal with daily and these issues increase in less than a year
after purchasing a brand new laptop. Shouldn’t we demand more from the hardware
manufacturers?
I’m about to switch to Mac and while the artist in me is thrilled,
I worry about compatibility issues and the learning curve to get me to
what people say, will be a ‘simpler life.’
That said, the decision is final. I finally made the plunge and as I write, there’s a Mac
Book Pro on its way to me directly from Apple.
While there’s no question, I’m a power user, I decided not to
order the ‘very top of the line’ since it offers more than I’ll need. Did I mention that the price is nearly double what I’d pay to get the ‘same specs’ in a
Lenovo or an equivalent? Additionally, these beautifully designed machines are heavy,
roughly 30% heavier than had I gone for the latest Lenovo or
Toshiba.
While I’m eager to start my ‘simpler technology life,’ I have my
doubts. For the Apple fan boys who claim Macs are perfect and problem-free, I’d
love to know why I own five iPods and only two of them actually work. My iPhone
hasn’t given me any issues so far nor has my iPad, but I haven’t put it through
the ringer by loading hundreds of apps like I need to do on my laptop.
While many of you may be okay with upgrading every piece of hardware
we own every two years, should you be? How thin do we need our phones to be? How
many apps do we really need? How many pixels do we need? How much memory do we really
need? If I hear one more person insisting that I spend an additional $500 for a
solid state drive, I’m going to scream. These are the same people who will
insist I upgrade to an even faster solid state drive in a year and spend $500
again.  
It’s no wonder we keep spending to keep this senseless pattern
alive. We get dished language that goes something like this: 
For the
new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, it’s the screen — all 2880 x 1800 pixels
of it — that will leave others scrambling to play catch-up. Of course, to push
that many pixels you need serious horsepower. And the next-gen MacBook Pro
(starting at $2,199) delivers just that with a quad-core Core i7 processor,
Nvidia Kepler graphics and super-fast flash memory. Did we mention the MacBook
Pro is only 4.5 pounds and is nearly as thin as the Air? 
Manufacturers stick together, use glossy language to woo us in and build in the same obsolescence. When the industry and consumers comply, no one can complain since they all seem to die a slow horrible death much
faster than they should given how much we spend. (see blog post entitled the iPad Mini: Why Apple Thinks You’re an Idiot).
But alas, a dozen blog posts from now, I’ll be on a new machine, a
Mac Book Pro, and hopefully in some magical way, my technology life will be
transformed for the additional $800 I’m spending.
While I’m looking forward to what the Mac Book Pro will deliver,
sometimes I want to just toss all of it into the ocean, or give a little pain
back to the hardware that has cost me so much value time over the years, not
that I’ll ever have the courage of course. That said, it appears not everyone
shares my constraint.
 

Also refer to two posts I wrote a year or so ago on digital personas and digital ‘silence.’ Here’s a blog post
on social media turning you into a low confidence anxiety-rich freak.
Photo credits in order of appearance: A mashup created with
Webdoc, Scott Kline, CoolGizmotoys.

Mobile Loco Brings the Best of Advertising, Geo-Location & Branding to the Mobile World

Held last week in San Francisco, the MobileLoco event merged the best of geo-location, advertising, branding and the mobile world.
Run by serial marketer Mark Evans, the event aspires to dive into the brand, advertiser and mobile convergence in the context of the Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) marketplace.
The discussions revolved around what this convergence means for big brands, consumers, SMBs and the mobile and location industry.  
On-stage, we heard from the likes of Andrew Mason of Groupon, Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley, Banjo’s Danien Patton and the Mobile Engineering Lead of Airbnb Andrew Vilcsak.  Other voices included Bloomberg TV’s Cory Johnson, Google’s Don Dodge, Nextdoor’s Nirav Tolia, Postmates Bastian Lehmann, Foursquare’s Holger Luedorf, Micello’s Ankit Agarwal and others. 

Above: Andrew Mason, CEO of Groupon
Client inTooch partnered with MobileLoco so users could easily and seamlessly exchange contact and social network information on the fly. A free mobile app for iPhone and Android, attendees could network that much faster and more efficiently using the app rather than have to exchange business cards or manually add Twitter and Facebook ‘handles.’

Above: Steve Brehaut, Renee Blodgett, Julien Salanon

Since geo-tagging is built in, the inTooch app tracks where connection requests are made and will link all connection requests to the location, in this case the Mobile-Loco event in San Francisco, CA. When users browse through their connections, they can see all the connections they made at Mobile-Loco. 
There were other cool products there too. A group out of Japan from Daq was on-site showing off their creative iPhone and iPad IRUAL cases.  I find that most cases are pretty bland, come in plain colors or are frankly too tacky. Then there are those specifically targeted to the 13-18 year old market, but what happens if you don’t fall into any of those categories? I loved their designs specifically aimed at women – from soft and feminine to daring and electric.

Then, I had a demo of DigitalGlobe, who apparently did a deal with MapBox on the same day. Mapbox, which is a provider of open source solutions for designing and publishing maps via the cloud, chose DigitalGlobe as their commercial and earth imagery provider.
Users can now incorporate DigitalGlobe’s high-resolution satellite imagery as their maps’ base layer for added quality and rich detail. The result can be quite beautiful, especially compared to the bland offerings today.

Then I went back in time to my speech recognition and natural language processing days. I saw a nifty demo from a group who call themselves SpeakToIt. What they do? Develop talking personal assistants.
The SpeaktoIt Assistant is a virtual buddy for your smartphone that answers questions in natural language, performs tasks and notifies you of important events. The Assistant is meant to save you time and make communication with gadgets and web services easier and less stressful. 

All photos by Renee Blodgett.

Cormac ConroyVP, Engineering, Products, Qualcomm
David Staas, President, JiWire

inTooch Teamed Up With MobileLoco: Users Can Exchange Data On The Fly

inTooch, a mobile application that supports both Android and iPhone, easily and seamlessly allows you to
instantly exchange contact and social network information on the fly.
inTooch teamed up with San Francisco-based Mobile-Loco this past week, an event that explores the convergence of brands, advertising and
mobile.   
Attendees were encouraged to download the free
mobile app, so they could quickly exchange all their contact information or a portion of it with new
people they met at the event, including their social media network data. 
Whenever you meet
someone you want to stay in touch with, you simply call the person, the app
detects that you have called them for the first time and prompts you
automatically to exchange your contact information, giving you the option to
exchange your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn details as well.
Since geo-tagging is built in,
the inTooch app tracks where connection requests are made and will link all
connection requests to the location, in this case the Mobile-Loco event in San
Francisco, CA. When users browse through their connections, they can see all the connections they made at Mobile-Loco.  After the event, inTooch will also send an email to each user
who sent a connection request during Mobile-Loco with the list of all the
contacts they met at the event, resulting in a more efficient way to follow up
and turn contacts into relationships that matter. 
A useful augmented
reality feature, which is popular for personal encounters, is a report that
informs you of all the things you have in common with that person
(friends, places you visited, music, movies you like, social network info,
check-ins, interests you share).
Unlike most apps, inTooch works regardless of
whether the person you just met has it on his or her cell phone, making it the most natural, straight forward and easy
way to share your personal or business details.  inTooch is
available for download at http://www.intooch.com
and is free for users. Currently, inTooch works with both the Android and the
iPhone, with support for other platforms and mobile devices coming later this
year.
Photo above is of inTooch’s CEO Julien Salanon on the MobileLoco stage. 
Disclosure: I provide some consulting to inTooch.

Mobile Loco on Dec 11 Explores Brand, Advertiser & Mobile Convergence

For all things mobile, mark your calendar for December 11, 2012 in San Francisco. The upcoming Mobile-Loco conference will be held at Mission Bay Conference and we have been offered a special Magic Sauce Media discount for Down the Avenue and We Blog the World readers. 

Mobile-Loco will dive into the brand, advertiser and mobile convergence in the context of the Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) marketplace — exploring what this convergence means for big brands, consumers, SMBs and the mobile and location industry.  
Executives from Foursquare, Google, Airbnb, Groupon and other leading brands and investors will address these topics and discuss where the market is heading. Learn from brands how they are taking advantage of today’s new technologies and solutions to build durable brand engagement, relationships and presence in a chaotic and noisy marketplace.

It’s not news that if you’re not on mobile or have an integrated mobile strategy, you’ll be left behind quickly. Apps in this space are enabling hyper-local and real-time personalization, rich content and engagement, and ultimately more bricks-and-mortar transactions. At Mobile Loco, you’ll learn from the leading developers and enablers in this space.
Click here to register and receive a 25% discount off current registration rates.

Thought Leaders, Technologists & Academics Re-Imagine Global Health

I’m a huge supporter of TEDx events given their goal to make the world a better place and because I know how much time and effort goes into each one since I’m a co-curator myself of the annual TEDxBerkeley  event. 
Organizers need all the help they can get since the success is based on the work, effort and love from volunteers…in other words, everyone works around the clock without getting paid.
TEDxSF (San Francisco) recently had their event in conjunction with UCSF, around health, a critical topic on everyone’s mind in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Their theme was 7 Billion Well: Re-imagining Global Health.”
They brought together thought leaders and emerging pioneers in academia and technology to discuss the latest multidisciplinary ideas around the most pressing health issues of our world today. 
Christine Mason McCaull, Kunal Sood and their team did a smashing job with an incredible line-up of speakers, which included more women across the board than any other event I can think of outside of BlogHer. Hear hear. It’s also Christine’s last year curating the event, a huge loss for the TEDxSF team. 
Speaker’s topics included the Bay Area as a Global Health Hub by Jaime Sepulveda, issues around bleeding from Suellen Miller, embracing your children from Dr. Shefali Tsabary, investing in health markets from Yasmina Zaidman and corporate games for change from Adam Bosworth. (below) 

Dean Ornish (below) always has such a wonderful presence on stage. He shared his take on Dis-Ease and how lifestyle, diet and mental attitude is critical to avoiding disease and reversing problematic issues in order to bring the body back to its natural state.   

Jess Ghanamm addressed global health psychology and David Ewing Duncan (below) gave an amusing talk on aging. It may not surprise you but not everyone wants to live for another hundred years. 

Ankur Jain and Vinod Khosla took on investing to expand health globally, Sam Hamner talked about 1000 knees, Piya Sorcar addressed the tough issues around HIV education, and Patrick Lee explored primary care and what the U.S. can learn from Liberia. Yes, Liberia.
Then there was Kumaré, a film which also played at the recent SAND Conference (nonduality – where spiritualty and science meet) which I attended recently.  

Director Vikram Gandhi (above), who grew up consuming equal parts ancient Indian mythology and American movies, was incredibly amusing on stage as he uses satire to talk about his journey as a ‘false prophet’ to shoot the movie. 
We then dove into the mobile world with Sandeep Sood, Montana Cherney, Michael Blum and Jeff Tangney and heard from David Bolinsky, an all time favorite, who never falls short of presenting beautiful information in a way that is both compelling and moving. (below)

Fang “Jenni” Fang, Michelle Goodwin and Priyanka Jain spoke up for women, their stories tearfully inspiring. 

Then there was a treat…a very special treat. Lebohang “Levo M” Morake from South Africa flew over to sing a song he arranged for the infamous Lion King: He Lives in Me.

This song is not a favorite of mine, but for anyone who has lost someone in their life, the words will resonate with the pain you felt when you first realized the moment that you called upon your deceased loved one for guidance and comfort.
In other words, the spirits of our ancestors watch over us, protect and guide us on our life journey.  Did I cry? Yes. It was truly beautiful as was meeting Lebo after his performance.
See the videos I shot of the performance (Part I) and (Part II). Follow insights, passions and event info on @magicsaucemedia and @weblogtheworld. All photo credits: Renee Blodgett.

Sprinklr’s e-Book of 30 Essays on "Social at Scale”

The folks over at Sprinklr recently created an e-book collection of short essays on the theme “social at scale.”
The eBook provides advice from social media leaders on how to scale social media in the enterprise world.
I was invited to participate with 29 others, including Rohit Bhargava, Mitch Joel, Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Joseph Jaffe, David Meerman Scott, David Armano, Peter Shankman, Mack Collier, Michael Brito, Jay Baer, Edward Boches, Nilofer Merchant, Ted Coine, David Weinberger, Shelly Palmer, Mark Earls, Augie Ray, Brett Petersel, Ted Rubin, Sarah Evans, Jeff Bullas, Amy Vernon, Matt Dickman, Thomas Baekdal, Venkatesh Rao, Richard Stacy, Hugh MacLeod, and Doc Searls. Sprinklr termed the group the “Social Media Dream Team”. Go figure.
Aside from insights, there are also tips, useful checklists and a “readiness assessment.” Download the ebook here. 
 

Now in its Third Year, Tech4Africa Hits Johannesburg Next Month

Now in its third year, Tech4Africa is a premier mobile, web and emerging technology event held in Johannesburg on October 31-November 1 at The
Indaba Hotel, Gauteng.
The theme is “Unlocking the next billion consumers” and sessions will be focused around mobile
and content, the enterprise opportunity, entrepreneurship and financing, social
business and innovation.
The Developer Day and Hackathon on the kick off day includes three tracks: a day on Agile
software development, a Hackathon with sessions on Ruby on Rails, Python,
Raspberry Pi, PhP etc., as well as workshops for social media marketers on apps
ecosystem and monetization.  
Keynote speakers include IBM’s Tom Rosemalia and Ralph Simon of Mobilium,
with other speakers being Amolo Ng’weno, MD of Digital Divide Data in Kenya;
Neal Ford, Director, Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks; Vérone
Mankou, CEO of Way-C in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Emma Kaye, CEO of
Bozza, Josh Adler, social entrepreneur and others.

IBM’s Global Entrepreneurship Programme has been brought into the Tech4Africa 2012
agenda and Claudia Fan Munce, Managing Director at IBM Venture Capital Group, will introduce GEP and an
award programme. Tech4Africa 2012 will also be running Ignite again – a
start-up workshop and pitching competition, which is being run by AngelHub and
Deloitte.

A Google G+ Hangout will be held live at the conference so that tech hubs from
around Africa can be part of the conference and so that delegates can interact
with a panel, asking questions and finding out more about what is happening on
the ground in Senegal, Liberia, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, Kenya, Congo and other
parts of Africa.
Disclosure: we are a media partner of the event.