Interesting People
I just spent two days at the IT Financing Forum and will likely be putting up some notes soon. But the quick summary is that it was a great two days with many wonderful conversations, a good overall mood, some fantastic learning, and I met quite a few new people from Vancouver as well as [...]
The Vancouver Enterprise Forum event on Web 2.0 was an evening of firsts, at least if I judged it by the number of people signing up on the spot for the event who were not regular VEF attendees, the number of people who stayed after the presentation to talk to the presenters at the front [...]
Back in 2003, I attended a pivotal event at the Vancouver Enterprise Forum. Normally, these events generally follow a predictable pattern. People fill in the room, buy a drink and wander aimlessly. The venture capitalists avoid the nervous entrepreneurs with the bad pitches and the keen students stand nervously in the corner, not sure who [...]
If you haven’t checked it out yet, check out “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever” by Ray Kurzweil. It’s his newest book. The premise is that there are three bridges to get us to a nearly unlimited life span. The first is using what we already know. The second bridge is using biotechnology [...]
This speech is about “connecting the dots, love and loss, and death” is fantastic. Read it. Forward it to your kids, your friends, and your parents.
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
I love Ray Kurzweil. Here is a short but interesting interview from CIO magazine where Kurzweil predicts things that will sound outlandish to most people: • outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar [...]
I love this woman. It just goes to show you that once you know how to make money, you can do it anywhere. Martha Stewart is forbidden from working on her Martha Stewart Living empire while in prison but that can’t stop her from writing her memoir and making $1 million per month for 5 [...]
The whole Martha Stewart débacle fiasco pisses me off. That’s the most eloquent way I can put it. The larger macro-trend is that the government has been under pressure to “do something” about corporate malfeasance. So do they do something about people who are really committing heinous crimes and defrauding people of millions of dollars? [...]
Here is yet another example of the nano-bio convergence that is happening, although this time it is the disciplines themselves physically converging in a new research facility. This can only help accelerate the interesting developments between the two sciences.
If you have a love of architecture, green homes, virtual reality, and Dilbert, and you have a good half hour to waste spend, I recommend that you visit Scott Adam’s new Virtual home tour at http://www.dilbert.com/duh and be prepared to be blown away. The house design was the result of thousands of Dilbert readers collaborating [...]
To those of us in the Vancouver tech community, it will come as no surprise when Ludicorp hits the big-time with their amazing web-based photo-sharing application Flickr that allows its users to: • upload from Macs, PCs, and cameras • create albums for their friends to view • blog their photos to any blogging application [...]
How cool is this? Metin Sitti, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Nano-Robotics lab has built a robot patterned on water striders, that can walk – not float – on water and that can propel itself forward the same way that water striders do. The “bug” contains about $10 worth of material. Mike Crissey, writer for [...]
I am thrilled to see Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the premier Valley VC firms, has launched his own blog. One of his recent posts discusses the very ideas that I mentioned in my blog-defining first post – namely that the next 20 years (2005-2025) will bring the same amount of change [...]
What a crazy but interesting project. I would hate to see what would happen if one of the jet engines cut out. Yves Rossy set out to build a personal jet that he could strap onto his back. If this site is real, it appears that he succeeded. According to his website: “After many trials [...]
Wired wrote this great article on the MoveOnPAC, which was started by two founders, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, only six years ago and which has become “one of the most revered activist groups in America, supporting Democratic political candidates with tens of millions of dollars in advertising, as well as countless hours of telephone [...]
Life imitates art. Art imitates life. “Godsend“, a movie opening August 17th, starring Robert de Niro as a doctor who clones children for parents who have lost a child due to early accidents or other loss, has a real-life equivalent. Or so says the man in question – Doctor Panos Zavos. Quoting from a news.scotsman.com [...]
I have been reading about online communities since the days of the WELL (one of the first electronic communities to ever exist.) Of course, humans have always formed communities as part of their biological imperative – communities for living, for art, for trades, for commerce, for sex, for war, and for peace. And the internet [...]
Fast Company linked over to this Tufts University transcript of Pierre and Pam Omidyar’s commencement speeches to the Class of 2002. Some key lessons from Pierre and Pam’s speeches: • Prepare for the unexpected – prepare lots and learn lots but don’t feel that you have to connect all the dots at the same time; [...]
I love Craig Venter for his long view, his burning curiousity, and his adventurous spirit. And probably because he pisses so many people off in the scientific community for being a dilletante. And yet, he has done more for the development of the various *omics (genomics, proteomics) than almost all others to date. This article [...]
Here is a wonderful article on Laurance Rockefeller, philanthropist, philosopher, mediator, venture capitalist, conservationist. It is inspiring to say the least.
I love this article on Bob Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace, who along with others is competing in the X Prize competition for $10 million to build a private space ship. The space station will cost approximately $200 MILLION when it’s completed, versus the current International Space Station which has cost $50 BILLION – 250x more. [...]
I’m attracted to this weird piece for so many reasons. It contains social networking, human connection, breach of trust, and one man’s story about how he is managing to handle (or not handle?) his life. It is the story of a man named Odin Soli who created an online persona named Layne Johnson and wrote [...]
The author of this blog-post comments on how this seems intuitively sensible, which I agree with. The more people I meet, the more different they are, the wider their world-views, and the more we interact, the more I feel that I can think “between the cracks” of the different knowledge domains. So the lesson here [...]
If you have not read anything about Burning Man, the anarchist art and culture festival held every year in the desert of Nevada, then you have been living under a rock. Here is a short but interesting article on the ongoing evolution of the Burning Man urban planning methodology. Picture building a city for 30-40,000 [...]
This is a wonderful article from the SF Gate website about a man named Dick Grace. From football captain to Marine Captain, to VP of Smith Barney Investments, and now a reformed alcoholic and Buddhist who owns a niche Cabernet Sauvignon winery and spends his time, money, and effort raising money for kids around the [...]
For anybody interested in stories of interesting people, behavioural structures, anti-capitalist brain-washing, or even those who think that they work a lot, I suggest reading this very cool article on Silicon Valley News about Min Zhu, the Webex founder.
The Universe is 14 billion years old and will either either re-collapse into itself, expand into a completely diluted state, or rip apart in its 36th billion year in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn asunder in a fraction of a second. How do we manage the polarity inherent [...]
