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.
The second session, ‘Reframe’ started with an overly caffeinated Tim Berners-Lee, rehashing his ‘Semantic Web’ nebula of ideas, confusing ‘raw data’ with ‘linked data’ and dumbing down (or just ignoring) the major issues of ontological integrity, privacy, replication of resources, presentational issues, scalability etc. Of course, some of these challenges have been addressed, but that doesn’t mean that his presentation should just ignore all that’s important about the Semantic Web and present the kindergarten version of what it is. As far as I’m concerned, the Semantic Web, as an all encompassing, self-explanatory, linked data ecosystem is a pipe dream; on the other hand, ontologically distinct, smaller-scale systems are probably going to benefit the most from semantic data provision and processing; ironically that’s all Berners-Lee used as examples: small scale examples, e.g. how ‘linked-data’ helps scientists, engineers or how a common format for social networking could remove the barriers between competing networks. If it ever becomes reality, it’s probably going to be from the bottom-up and it most certainly not going to be due to Berners-Lee’s talk 🙂
Nandan Nilekani, founder, CEO etc. of Infosys talked about India. His talk was average and somewhat detached from India — he employed ideas as a vehicle for presenting change and divided ideas in four classes depending on their state and maturity — from old, to current, to ideas being argued and those that are going to come in future years and that we need to anticipate. Not that bad, but nothing exceptional there.
Pattie Maes, who I first read about in 2001, presented a pretty funny, yet pointless, MIT Media Lab technology that effectively is the combination of a small projector, a camera and a very small factor networked computer (viz. mobile phone) to provide what she called the ‘sixth sense’. As Yorgos put it, it could have been one of those sketches on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Come on. Really.
Ray Anderson, an entrepreneur with an environmental conscience was next. I first saw Ray Anderson in Joel Bakan’s The Corporation in 2003. He’s a charismatic speaker, with a noble cause and admirable ethics. He’s also apparently skilful having sustained growth while turning his company into the greenest company in the world with a zero-carbon footprint. I wish he had some more on the actual figures in his slides.
There were more talks that I’m forgetting, but that’s probably where I left as it was very late (see after 04:00) and I was extremely tired. I missed Seth Godin (marketer, totally uninteresting), Jake Eberts (producer), Yann Arthus-Bertrand (photographer — that could’ve been nice from an æsthetics point of view if it weren’t so late) and Regina Spektor (the Russian-born, US-raised popular singer).
Ok that’s it for Part I. I didn’t mention the ‘artists’ in there. That is the performing artists that also had their ‘slots’. That’s probably as I didn’t find them very inspiring. Part II coming soon, so stay tuned.
