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 【介绍】TED年会：看看美国“精英”阶层去的聚会 |
天蝎座的
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头衔: 海归中将 
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加入时间: 1970/01/01
文章: 3185
来自: S.F
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【介绍】TED年会：看看美国“精英”阶层去的聚会
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作者：天蝎座的 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
这个年会是本蝎认为最不boring的会议。抛砖引玉。今年的TED现在正在long beach进行。
GO TO WWW.TED.COM you won't regret it .
you will know why poeple pay $6000 to go there (your money doesn't gurantee yu a seat. Likely, one will be put on waiting list if he/she is a new comer).
转自旧金山纪事报
TED conference begins in Monterey
Alan T. Saracevic, Chronicle Business Editor
Thursday, February 28, 2008
The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference is often described as a place where you go to meet people who are much smarter than you. It's also not a bad place to meet people who are much richer than you, much more successful and generally much better known.
Indeed, the corridors of the Portola Plaza Hotel at Monterey Bay, along with the Marriott across the street, were crawling with power brokers and pop culture icons, artists and altruists for the four-day conference, running Wednesday through Saturday.
The mix of attendees speaks largely to the conference's evolution over the years, growing from a fairly geeky tech confab into a global think fest with the mandate of solving the world's problems.
And if this group can't get things started in the right direction, we're not sure who could. There's Google co-founder Larry Page, checking e-mail on his handheld as he strolls across the street. There's Bart Simpson's real dad, Matt Groening, hanging out with a group of pals in the lobby. Not far away, noted tech thinker Esther Dyson chats up eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. And let's not forget San Francisco author Amy Tan, waiting down the hall for one of the many byzantine registration functions required at TED.
They're all here, but it's not the kind of place to come for celebrity watching. Security is tight as a drum, largely because of the status of said clientele and the multithousand-dollar price tag to attend. Everyone has to wear these honking huge badges with their pictures, names, etc., written in 80-point type. This, of course, creates the time-honored, weird conference experience of looking at everyone's chest as they walk by in order to see who they are, rather than offering up the usual half-smile and nod.
You get the picture. Big Shots. Big Thoughts. Big Ideas. All set in bucolic Monterey, where a pack a lazy harbor seals are lolling on the beach about 300 yards away.
Who are we?
Who are we? That was the question that kicked things off Wednesday morning. (The theme of the show is "The Big Questions.")
Here's the quick answer: We're walking, talking, big-brained apes that evolved from common ancestors like gorillas and chimpanzees. We've been around for millions of years. And it's unclear how much longer we'll be around.
More precisely, that was the quick answer offered by world-famous paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey in her talk to the crowd intended to spell out where we stand as a species.
She went on to spell out our predicament in more detail. "We're certainly a polluting, wasteful, aggressive species, with a few nice things thrown in perhaps," said Leakey, whose childhood was spent digging up human fossils with her equally famous parents in East Africa. "We have reached extraordinary numbers on this planet. We've only been around 200,000 years as a species, yet we've reached 6.5 billion in population. We have to control our numbers, because we can't hold it together (at this rate).
"We have the communications skills to make the right decisions. But will we do that?" That was the question she really wanted us to think about.
Now, listening to Leakey didn't really unearth any shocking new developments for myself or anyone else in the room. It's clear that we, as a society and planet, have serious issues facing us from every side. It's unclear whether we're going to pull it together enough to survive.
But, more than anything, Leakey's discourse pointed out the purpose of gatherings like TED. It forces the movers and shakers of the world to confront the questions right in front of us. Who are we? Where are we going? How can we fix it? Whether this format produces any real change can be debated. But for the vast majority of us locked in the day-to-day struggle to survive, perform, cope, this kind of discussion is a wildly refreshing reminder of what's important.
Photographer Chris Jordan, an artist who creates art with social messages, tried to answer the same Big Question - Who are we? - a few minutes after Leakey did. In doing so, he also pointed out some stuff we all know, but never focus on: Why do so many people still die from smoking? Why do so many people die from prescription drugs? Why have over 300,000 American women received breast augmentations? Can't we figure these things out?
"I have this fear we aren't feeling enough. We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger, our grief," said Rivers. But even if we regain those abilities, acknowledge these basic truths, he wasn't sure we could answer the question he really wanted us to consider: "How do we change?"
Stay tuned to the Tech Chronicles at sfgate.com/blogs/tech for TED news, views and perusals. For details on the conference, go to ted.com.
作者：天蝎座的 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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天蝎座的
[博客]
[个人文集]
头衔: 海归中将
声望: 博导
加入时间: 1970/01/01
文章: 3185
来自: S.F
海归分: 507616
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【福布斯杂志关于TED年会】What A Billionaire (Really) Wants 【ZT】
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作者：天蝎座的 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
What A Billionaire (Really) Wants
Quentin Hardy, 03.01.04, 4:37 PM ET
NEW YORK - The future visited Monterey, Calif., last week, promising fewer woes, many smiles and breathtaking technological advances.
The future, in the form of smart reads on where exploration, genomics, social psychology, mathematics, marketing and lots more things are headed, is always present at the annual TED conference. TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, draws some 800 people paying $4,000 apiece to witness, cogitate and commune on creation and discovery. The theme this year was "The Pursuit of Happiness," and it may have contributed to the euphoria.
The audience and presenters, who continually intermingled, included founders and guiding lights of Intuit, eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ), Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ), Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ) unit AOL, Celera Genomics (nyse: CRA - news - people ), Priceline.com (nasdaq: PCLN - news - people ) and Google. There were venture capitalists, chief technology officers and Hollywood bigshots too, from such companies as Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ), Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) and IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ). Given the quality and influence of this crew, what the self-described TEDizens take from these visions will probably affect how the rest of us live.
"This is the brain trust of the New Economy, right here," said TED organizer Chris Anderson, a British publisher who a couple of years ago set up the conference as a nonprofit organization. In the earnest, irony-free spirit of TED, it did not seem like hyperbole.
There is nothing apparent in the way of inside deals there, though the massive levels of networking (TEDizens must order business cards by the cubic foot) make it impossible to say for sure. Google's Sergey Brin, anticipating questions on the date of a putative Google IPO, deflected the onslaught by saying, "Since many of you are wondering ... boxers." Instead, he talked about how he and co-founder Larry Page keep people happy and motivated at and with Google (let employees spend 20% of their time on projects of their own choosing, search for efficiencies everywhere).
Most of the happiness at TED consists of the pleasure of finding things out. Really impressive things, such as evidence of the Great Inflation, the big growth that came 10 to the -35th of a second after the Big Bang and made our universe possible. They heard about where astronomy is headed next. They heard about advances in ape-human communication, about undersea technologies that enable us to discover seven new species an hour and about proof that happiness can be both synthesized by amnesiacs and built up like a muscle by meditation. They heard how mathematicians have found that the urge to synchronize works inside flocks of birds, schools of fish and certain inorganic objects. They learned how much the economics of a crack gang resembles that of McDonald's (nyse: MCD - news - people ), and how the future business is centered on manufacturing authentic experiences.
There was ample news about discoveries in the science of happiness itself. It increases with more contact with nature and less introspection, according to Nancy Etcoff, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania noted that happiness grows in finding one's greatest talents, putting them at the center of one's life and working in a cause greater than oneself--at which point the pleasures of a crate of Godiva chocolates in the back of a Porsche really do make you happy.
"The skills for happiness are different than the skills for relieving misery," Seligman said, "and this is true for technology, entertainment and design, too.... They can be used to increase meaning and engagement."
Careful observers gained pleasure in a whole other layer of knowledge--less concrete, but more tantalizing--by watching the interaction of speaker and audience. Consider the feverish note-taking of AOL founder Steve Case--now a major land developer in Hawaii--when social observer Malcolm Gladwell noted how often consumers misdirect because they do not know what they desire. Later, during Case's off-the-record talk, Google's Brin--soon likely to face his own high-stakes business encounters--sat intensely on the edge of his seat, intently listening to Case and his experience. Jazz legend Herbie Hancock saw one future of music when he was blown away by the piano skills of 14-year-old Jennifer Lin, awed by a classical maestro with full-bore improvisational chops.
Along with the visions, there are two other benefits to TED. One is the networking--nearly always, nearly all the time and aided by very clever Macromedia (nasdaq: MACR - news - people ) software that figures out who in the room closest matches your love of wine, your passion for rock climbing and your sexual proclivity (or whatever).
The other is the therapeutic effect of 96 hours in a willing suspension of cynicism, doubt and irony, as all these amazing visions are displayed. That may sound easy, given the incredible quality of ideas, talkers and canapés, but it is still an immensely rare and valuable experience in our culture. The TEDsters (as they also call themselves--while first-timers are called virgins--but please, nobody say "cult," we're staying positive here) hope to turn into clear-eyed optimists, and possibly even the proprietors of large and profitable businesses.
The ironic impulse was occasionally tested, as when billionaire publisher Felix Dennis, purveyor of the male fantasy magazine Maxim, urged all women never, ever to submit to plastic surgery. Dennis then read a poem about his mother while synthesizer music played in the background. (The poem even rhymed.)
But most of the talkers deserved their standing ovations, their gushing lauds. For three days, some of the world's best and most successful minds gathered to take themselves, life and the world seriously, in a spirit of comradeship and without fear of ridicule. Four thousand dollars may have been a cheap price to pay. Now they are back at their desks, where--until the future shows up for good--it is still hard and gutsy work to be that happy.
作者：天蝎座的 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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