Forbes writes about the Technology, Entertainment & Design conference which took place recently, where the “central theme was Rebirth, including sessions on Resilience, Emotion, Creation and, on Saturday, a final one on Hope.” TED had its abundance of tech talk:
Jeff Bezos, lean and keen, gave a perky presentation on how the digital revolution has barely begun. Sliced bread, the standard against which other innovations are touted as “the greatest thing since,” popped up in 1928 but didn’t catch on for 15 years. “It was a complete, total failure,” rescued only by the debut of Wonder bread, he told the crowd. He showed a 1917 Sears ad that exhorted, “Use your electricity for more than just light.” “That’s where we are” on the Web today, he said. “Every idea begets another idea. If you do believe it’s the very beginning, then you’re incredibly optimistic–and I am.”
Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson talked up the promise of nanotech, the futuristic manufacture of teensy machines, chips and components at the invisible, submicroscopic level.
Juan Enriquez, director of Harvard Business School’s Life Science Project, invoked the promise of the densest of memory chips: a microscopic organism called amoeba dubia.
