November 6, 2009. New York City. City Winery, Tribeca. Ted^XEast, (x=independently organized TED event). Forward thinking New Yorkers gathered this afternoon at the City Winery, another center for innovation that leverages state of the art technology to pour premium hand-crafted wines.  Technology, great minds and wines. What could go wrong? This post is two of a two part series on the event.

“Obsessions Make My Life Worse and My Work Better”

(Stefan Sagmeister, TED conference)

Scott Heiferman

Scott Heiferman is CEO and a co-founder of Meetup. He opens up with speaking about the story behind the “I have a dream speech” from Martin Luther King. Apparently, the speech was completely unscripted where Dr. King was being asked by a colleague what he is passionate about and Dr. King starts getting worked up and passionate and the guy tells him “ Tell him about your dream!” And this is when Dr. King goes on stage to speak the speech that you know now.

But how do we do this when we are surrounded with a “I have a nightmare speech” – he shows the poster ad for 2012. Then he shows the ad for “Trauma” which launches on TV soon.  And then the Cloverfield ad where the Statue of Liberty is chopped in two. Then he shows a recent NYTimes article that shows a gripping horrible headline about the war in Iraq and at the top banner ads read “There Will Be Blood”.

How do you form a vision of a future with this kind of prophesy?

Then he shows a photo from his apartment of the twin towers on fire during 9/11.

What happens when apocalypse becomes reality? Local communities sprung up immediately afterwards. “There’s a lot more small going on. A lot more local communities going on. It wasn’t happening so much a few years ago and now it’s happening more and more. Meetup has turned in thousands of local community groups that are brand new that are being held every week or so. Cherokee Count Asberger’s Symptoms Parents Support Group, for example.“

Will 2012 be like the movie 2012? Or will be living your dream?

Paul Steely White

Paul is the Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives in Manhattan. He speaks about the Livable Streets Movement: Why we battle to reclaim the urban commons from the car. He highlights how much traffic congestion limits idea growth in the city. “The definition of a city is density. Lots of buildings. And the space between the buildings are limited. Then why do we choose the lowest density mode of transportation?’ How can we reduce the role of the car in the city?

If you have heavy traffic in the city, you reduce the quality of life and social opportunity between people that live in the neighborhoods with high traffic.

He shows a picture of Einstein riding a bike with the quote “E=mc². I thought of that while riding my bike”.

“Take ownership of your streets. Think of it as you do your living room. Live in it, embrace it”

November 6, 2009. New York City. City Winery, Tribeca. Ted^XEast, (x=independently organized TED event). Forward thinking New Yorkers gathered this afternoon at the City Winery, another center for innovation that leverages state of the art technology to pour premium hand-crafted wines.  Technology, great minds and wines. What could go wrong?

TED events have 50 million viewers all over the world, aligned with their mission – “ideas worth spreading”. The concept is to have key speakers surface important life changing ideas through presentations, and then networking ensues for the attendees to discuss how to implment . Ted^X provides the opportunity for local communities to take the mission of TED into their personal, professional and family networks.

Suzy Welch

Former editor of Harvard Business Review and author, Suzy Welch’s most recent book, 10-10-10 uncovers decision making for life changing. She opens the Ted^X  conference by first she asking you for introspection with some questions she calls “scary”:

• Fast forward to our 70th birthday party – what would make you cry with regret? (living deliberately)
• What do you want people to say about you if they knew that you were living your truth? (refining character)
• What do you love about your upbringing and what do you hate? (defining value system)

“Live is pretty empty unless you live it with your values and you develop those values by asking yourself these questions”. This is when you start making “value driven decisions” and you start living a more authentic life.

Rachel Stern

Rachel Stern speaks about the evolution of news and the risk defragmentation brings to democracy. The new “news” comes from social media organizations like Wikipedia and Huffington Post.  Although this empowers regular citizens to contribute with opinion and events; “transparency trumps neutrality” in the sense that the channels respect individuals that are transparent, versus neutral. Consider the handful of citizens empowered as Wikipedia delegates and Huffington Post’s pre-approved comments– Rachel quotes Esther Dyson and indicates “we are all fact checkers now”.  What are the implications of these new news systems in altering public opinion?

Dr. William Duggan

Dr. William Duggan, author of  speaks of creative spark. “For creative thought you do not imagine something new. You take in things from the outside and  you make a new combination. It’s a new combination of previous elements. The elements are not new. The combination of those elements is new.”  He speaks of Google’s 2 founders – Larry Page and Sergey Brinand says that what they created was innovative.  [ed: Meh]

He then flashes a picture of a Stanford Computer Science professor – Larry and Sergey were his students. “The topic he taught wasn’t search, it was a discussion of portals, like Yahoo, the goal of a portal being that you stay on that page as long as possible. Google took the .13 seconds you get your results and you are on to something else. It’s the opposite of a portal.  Data mining for eCommerce was the original concept that the Google founders worked on.

“They took data mining and eCommerce and came up with a concept called Page Rank, with altavista which allowed you to see ranking. They renamed it Google and everyone on campus used it, and raised tons of capital and used it. But then decided to give it up.

“The problem was, how were they going to monetize this concept? If they can’t make money –how would last. The problem was that ads were too heavy and would slow down the site. What to do?

“Then they ran into a company called overture which display ads in a list based format using search. This is what they combined into Google and they made money.

“Nothing here was invented. It was a new combination of previous elements. The elements were not new the combination was new."

“Now you know how Microsoft started. Now you know how Apple started. But that’s not my topic. My topic about you. Now you know the process for creativity. ” Talk to one another about elements that are not new and combine them into creativity.

  

My recent MSDN Roadshow fellow traveler & co-presenter Mark Pollack speaks further about the topic he covered this call : dependency injections in the latest episode on ARCast.TV.

ARCast.TV - Mark Pollack on Architecture Refactoring

While there are many qualities by which to judge an architecture, two technologies--dependency injection (DI) and aspect-oriented programming (AOP)--provide guidance on some of the most foundational. Not only do they influence how a system's components are designed and organized, they also determine how easily the system may evolve. In this episode, Mark Dunn and Mark Pollack discusses DI and AOP from an architectural point of view, showing how the principles promoted by DI and AOP translate to tangible architectural benefits such as loose coupling and a separation of business and technical concerns.