Posts Tagged ‘TED’
Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 5th, 2009
It is interesting to see how today’s medium (especially social) can easily blow issues out of proportion. At one of this morning’s TED sessions, Bill Gates delivered an outstanding presentation on his foundation and the work they are doing to eradicate malaria. As an audience attention getting device, Gates brought along several mosquito traps (he only took one on stage with him). I sat two seats away from him and actually looked at the traps. I’m not sure about the one he had on stage, but the one that I looked at appeared to have one mosquito in it. I was a few feet from where it was released, and maybe saw one fly out of the trap.
The web and social networks lit up however. Headlines on websites popped up and Twitterers had a field day. Posts like this one on HeraldSun stated “Bill Gates ‘lets loose mosquito swarm’ at TED conference, “Bill Gates Terrifies TED Conference with Mosquitoes” “Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm on TED Conference Attendees (and actually questions the legality of doing so),” “Bill Gates Released a lot of Bugs Yesterday.” It seems there is more focus on his cute audience attention gaining device than on the content of a really great message. In fact, the little stunt came back to haunt him in the form of a bit of a negative comment about Bill’s reputation for releasing buggy software, which he took in good humor and in stride.
If you really want to get to the deeper meaning of his message, go to read his excellent annual letter.
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 4th, 2009
A couple of years ago at TED, we heard from a young grad student named Jeff Han. Jeff showed off a new technology. This technology showed off a new type of interface that anyone who watched the elections on CNN is now familiar with, but at the time no one had seen – the multi-touch. It’s on your I-phone and you are going to see it more and more places. Everyone that was in the audience knew that we were among the first to see a new technology that was going to take off.
Today we got to see another such technology. MIT Media Lab researcher Pattie Maes showed a technology that her team has been working on that allows us to integrate data with our other senses. The device that she showed us built from off the shelf parts (like a simple web cam) “sees,” and can search for information based on what it sees. For example, you can look at a book in a bookstore, and the devise will pull up an Amazon review and project it onto the book pages for you to read. If you see something you would like to take a picture of, you simply form your hands into a frame, the device “sees” it, and takes a picture of what you have in the frame. It can also project numbers onto your hand which then act as a keyboard for your cell phone.
My words can not do justice to this invention, but my sense is that you will see it soon enough – it is simply is a technology that has to make it out of the lab, and according to the inventor – will cost about the same as today’s cellphone. It is a bit bulky, but remember, it is a prototype.
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 4th, 2009
Sir Tim Berners Lee shared at his TED session about how he developed the World Wide Web. He put it out as a memo, but nothing happened until 18 months later – his boss said he could do it on the side as a “play project.” Roughed up http, urls,etc. He did it because he was frustrated. Years later after his boss had died, they found the original memo with the following comment written on it “vague but exciting“.
The focus of his talk was on the importance of Linked Data – the more things you can link together the more valuable the data becomes. He indicated that today there are far too many silos of information. The power and benefit of linked data is fantastic and goes way beyond what he created when he created the web.
Berners Lee said in essence that data needs to be linked to be “freed.” Too much focus is placed on making a beautiful website for the data, but he states, “give us unadulterated RAW DATA NOW,” (and led the audience in a chant about this) so that the data can be used in many different ways.
This was a great presentation from a living legend.
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 3rd, 2009
For several years now SubscriberMail has worked with the organizers of the TED event. We send out millions of pieces of email for them related to the event itself, as well as announcing the incredible videos they post every week on the TED website (if you haven’t seen them, it is a viewing must). Recently, I received an email from Tom Reily a really incredible individual and key member of the TED team asking if we would support a new program TED had introduced called the TED Fellows program. TED recognized that there are many remarkable individuals that would never have an opportunity to participate in the community or attend a TED event, so Tom and his crew developed a very creative program to locate the individuals, fund their participation and bring them into the community. I agreed to participate as it sounded like an interesting part of the TED community (I’m not sure there is really any part of the community that isn’t).
Yesterday Tom issued a Press Release about the Fellows and listed the first group. What an amazing group of people. I invite you to visit the TED Fellow page and read a bit about this remarkable group of people who come from every walk of life, all with incredible accomplishments and achievements. They include:
- The creator of the first African online ad network and the African equivalent of The Huffington Post
- A New Zealand physicist who discovered the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare
- The founder of an international women’s inventor network
- An Indian design researcher dedicated to improving the lives of children
- A Korean-American actress whose one-woman show tells the story of a North Korean spy
The Fellows have their own blog where they will be posting their perspective on the conference. One of my goals is to have an opportunity to meet each of them at the event and perhaps post a bit about their stories here over time. If you are interested in learning more about the program, and perhaps even applying for a future program, you will find information here.
The Bezos Family and The Harnisch Foundation are provided key funding to launch the project and Nokia, Kodak, Livescribe, One.org, Lynda.com and SubscriberMail are all providing additional support in the form of in kind donations. For our part, each of the Fellows will have the ability to use the SubscriberMail system in the business or endeavors, and we will provide them with a support program designed to ensure their success.
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Posted by Jordan Ayan on February 2nd, 2009
If you have followed this blog you have probably noticed like many things in the digital world, we have evolved. Email marketing, social media, word-of-mouth marketing, video blogging, podcasting and a myriad of other digital communication technologies are rapidly changing, merging, morphing and intersecting. To focus exclusively on email, and disregard all that is happening in the other spaces can create Digital Marketing Myopia (modernizing a great term coined by the great Theodore Levitt) and can cause a marketer to lose track of how these great options can work together.
So today we introduce Digital Spin, the SubscriberMail team’s perspective on the digital marketing space and related world. We hope that you enjoy it, and welcome your feedback and comments. This week, I will also be including insight from the outstanding TED conference in Long Beach. While the conference is not marketing focused (although Seth Godin is one of the speaker’s), it is sure to be filled with nuggets of digital gold from folks like Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee and many others (conference details are available on the program page).
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