I came to know of C4 after finding online videos from some of the talks there in 2007. Living in an — almost bankrupt financially, intellectually and creatively — land, the C4 videos brought a glitter of hope; like Google Video lectures, Microsoft’s MURL (now ResearchChannel), C4 presented a community, a world so rare in Hellas; interesting people, knowledgeable people, smart people working with fascinating technology, talking about their work and actually having interesting things to say. This was no ‘ordinary’ commercial conference; not an academic exercise in intellectual masturbation. It was hands-on, to the point and pleasant.

The next year we were starting AthensBook and Geo|Ads and I looked for videos of that year’s C4 (C4[2]), but they were nowhere to be found. Yet C4 continued and I had almost forgotten about it until earlier today when my customary visit to my feed reader informed me that C4 was no more; the reason: Apple’s continued world-domination-driven policy of restricting developer freedom, enforcing its own terms down their customers’ throats, but more importantly how the latter effectively accept it.

And while I — too — am concerned about the direction Apple has taken in the past few years (especially when contrasted with their policy, image and general position a decade ago, when they were weak and trying to restore their financial condition and technical standing in the market), I am not quite certain that discontinuing C4 is really helpful for the Mac, iPhone or wider software development community, or that it will have any significant impact in Apple’s decision making in the future.

The second day of TED2009 was somewhat more interesting. Oliver Sacks, probably most known (if at all) by the masses for his book Awakenings, upon which the synonymous movie was based. His presentation kickstarted the day focusing on syndromes that affect people with limited vision. One symptom is the creation or fusion of vision with imaginary constructs, sometimes geometric shapes, others tokens from one’s imagination or things that the person has experienced/seen recently.

The next talk was by Olafur Eliasson. To me, It was a bit of a disappointment: I found his presentation arrogant, fluffy and somewhat pretentious and his work since The Weather Project uninteresting.

Ed Ulbrich, from Digital Domain followed, talking about the work behind the recent movie (and specifically the protagonist) (The Curious Case Of) Benjamin Button. The work was good and I was impressed by how frank he came across regarding the deficiencies of his company in this field. I can’t say I was very impressed by the result, but it was a decent presentation. While watching Ed’s presentation I thought that the work presented in this video could more or less help in the automated creation of any actor’s face, somewhat simplifying the workflow process in the future. There’s clearly a lot to be done in the field and I’m sure that Digital Domain, along with others, will play their role in this.
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This year I watched, along with a few friends and acquaintances of mine, TED 2009 over the ‘net. The experience was — overall — positive, although there were quite a few surprises (more on that later). In this post I’ll summarise some of the talks that made an impression (negative or positive) to me. I’m not going to mention those speakers that had shorter (i.e. 3 or 5 minute talks) and were not included in the Schedule as I probably don’t remember their talks. There may be exceptions.

In day one (Wednesday evening, EET+2) TED kicked off with the ‘Reboot’ session (I found the session naming somewhat pointless, if not pretentious — but then again it goes with the territory I guess). The organisation clearly lacked for we could not login with the provided credentials for some time, causing us to miss the talk by Juan Enriquez and the largest part of that of P.W. Singer. If anything the latter was somewhat interesting as it touches upon a multitude of moral issues regarding warfare. What we did catch was Bill Gates’ speech which was — suprisingly — quite good. I find Gates to be a boring, uncharismatic speaker in general and his presentation was unlike most others I’ve watched from him.
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