TED 2006 - Days 1 & 2

The incomparable TED conference got off to a roaring start. The theme is ostensibly Technology, Entertainment and Design, and the format is a set of short presentation on an eclectic variety of topics giving people plenty to talk about during the longer than average breaks. Of course a primary benefit is the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new ones.

Some things I learned at lunch before the conference started:

Scott Cook sees an opportuity for Intuit to help consumers manage health care the same way it helped them manage personal finance. He also described how QuckBase has quietly become an enterprise-grade version of what Lotus Notes was before it became too complex for mere mortals to use it to build applications.

Jay Walker is trying to figure out how to improve the health care by getting people to take more interest in self-preservation.

Sunny Bates sold her search firm to start something to connect donors to worthy casues.

Some of the interesting talks on the first day:

Robert Wright, author of Non-Zero turned out to be quite an entaining speaker.

Nicholas Negroponte described his One [$100] Laptop per Child project.

Lisa Randall squeezed her book on multidimensional physics into 18 minutes.

Hans Rosling showed some excellent visualizations of
statistics on world health and income.

Al Gore gave an impassioned presentation on global warming, a term which Jay Walker later pointed out needs to be replaced with something more urgent such as "world-wide climate collapse."

Alan Russell showed some vert promising work in tissue regeneration.

Joe Derisi showed how to build your own micro array maker for diagnosing viral infections.

Pictures here.