Short of going to Davos, one of the best ways to network with great minds from all around the world is to attend the DLD Conference in Munich, which is organized by publisher Hubert Burda, hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart. Technology dominated majority of the great (& sometimes entertaining) panels. While it's a tough challenge trying to sum a conference which intended nothing less than uploading 21st century into its attendees' minds, I wanted to take a shot at highlighting some key observations here: [in no particular order]
- The way we communicate might change more than we expect in the near future and is likely to include tons more video
- 3 Billion of World's 6.6 Billion people are 25 years or younger, there are 3 billion cell phones out there and the current the number of video cameras globally exceed current world population
- Facebook will become more aggressive to expand its reach globally with its translation initiative without precluding potential acquisitions to achieve that goal
- Emerging countries are on track to represent 50% of World's GNP again by around 2030 - G7 of the future might look almost completely different than today
- US witnessed huge productivity gains since the '90s - its share of world manufacturing stayed constant at about 35%, but it achieves that with only half the people today
- Project Better Place intends to make Israel completely independent of oil by 2020 with a bold plan involving electric cars, solar panels for energy production, 500,000 charging stations and applying the mobile phone business model to electric cars while using current tax incentives as reinforcement - all with private investment, designed in such a way intended to be replicated in other countries
- 50% of world's oil is moved for transportation; Average car in Israel costs $15K, used for 8.1 years and is worth $2.3K at that point. However, average annual consumption of gas is $4.5K, totaling $36K, almost twice as much as the initial purchase value of the average car. So if people pay the same amount as a monthly service charge, they could own the electric car at the end of 4 years
- The biggest investor in the Project is Israel Corp, the major oil refiner in the country
- Human powered search engines like Mahalo and Wikia Search are facing an uphill battle against Google
- Great posts on this session on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb
- Geo-Information, virtual models of local geographies, freshly geo-tagged photos and custom maps overlaid with rich information from local users will significantly proliferate
- Google Earth now covers half the world's population and a third of the world's mass. It now includes transit info for 80 of the world's top cities; users are creating tons of custom maps and discovering anomalies like a Roman ruin or a new Chinese sub-marine near real-time using these new tools & mashups on Google
- Expect more intelligence to be applied to make sense of exploding media
- Yahoo's Flickr developed an algorithm for "interestingness" it's not only hard to trick but works very well - key point is every second of your life can be recorded, but you don't get a second life to review it
- TV is dead - long live the interactive mediums like internet and gaming
- In multiple instances and panels, it became quikcly clear that, the young generation (people younger than 25), prefer interactive mediums like social networks and gaming to watching TV. If they have to, they prefer to watch TV on their computers.
- Web is an excellent medium to efficiently turn media to a site of action and achieve mass scale faster than ever before resulting in concrete changes
- Examples include special blog collecting petitions which results in NY's "Passenger Bill of Rights" and Ukraine's government strategically being outmaneuvered by local flashmobs
- Sites like 23andme will have a huge impact on personalization of medicine and acceleration of medical research - It will also encourage people to submit more personal data in hopes of better understanding their ancestry and genetical predispositions to diseases which will then aid in fine-tuning cures to more precisely defined clusters of people and rare ailments.
- A combination of multiple disciplines including art, sound and visualization will aid us to better understand and conceptualize the physics of time-space warp, a multitude of dimensions way beyond 3 and how they interact.
- Seeing Krister Linder from Sweden perform live music on a panel, including a spur of the moment a capella rendition of Bob Marley's Redemption Song, and listening to 13 year old Tom Varsavsky talking about being targeted by Viagra ads in games, having 80 friends on Facebook, gaming 4-5 hours straight and referring to free wifi as "your wifi my wifi" was priceless.
- Google was mentioned in every context, usually in a positive light or as a leading example in almost every session by a multitude of speakers & panelists
