Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the TED Conferences, the Special Project Editor at Swiss news magazine L'Hebdo, and a frequent public speaker. He has authored several books. Most recently, his articles have appeared in Business Week, The Economist, IHT, WSJE, Foreign Policy, NZZ, Ilsole24ore Nòva24, Infoweek and others, and he is a frequent commentator on Swiss Public Radio's Grand8. He is a member of the Boards of Internet consultancies Namics and Tinext and of the Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, where he was a Fellow in 2004. He lives in Switzerland.
It happened on Saturday. Most of the videos and a one-hour summary, plus plenty of other content (pictures, blogs etc) on the official Pangea Day site.
The Solar Impulse team (the Swiss team building an aircraft powered solely by solar, I've already blogged about it) started today a full-scale simulation, with the two pilots each making a 25-hour non-stop "virtual flight".
Malcom Gladwell speculates (in a long New Yorker piece focusing on Nathan Myhrvold) on the nature of ideas and whether it takes genius to have them. "The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time."
John Gapper at the FT has a couple of "lingering doubts" about Gladwell's article, including criticism of Myhrvold's approach (patent troll): "it an idea does not actually work, then I would suggest that it does not count as an invention".
Are there hidden "backdoors" on commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors that would allow to "kill" them remotely? Interesting report by IEEE Spectrum.
Michele Bowman lists 5 trends in "mobile activism": "From fish farmers in India to mobile financing in Africa, the ability of the mobile phone to effect social change is one of the most exciting and important stories being written today" (From FringeHog)
Evgeny Morozov: "Somebody “hacked” a deer in Pennsylvania, attached a GPS, a cellphone with SMS, and used the SMS-to email-to-blog system to regularly post the location of the deer to a blog, then to a spreadsheet, to Google Maps and Google Earth"...
Insight from Tim Mansfield: "The primary goal of a social network is to connect people and help them maintain weak ties, not to simplify communication or help them stay in touch". For that we have email and IM.
OK folks, wherever you are, get your calendar out and write down this under Saturday, May 10th: Pangea Day.
I just got the most recent progress report from the team organizing it, and it will be a remarkable event. You don't want to miss it. You don't want your family and friends and neighbors and colleagues to miss it.
It will be a first-of-its-kind: a global campfire, an event bringing the world together and celebrating our common humanity through film. Broadcast simultaneously and live in over 100 countries, available as a full-screen webstream everywhere there is a broadband Internet connection, and visible on cell phones.
Pangea Day will feature four hours of films and videos, live music, short inspiring speeches, and live audiences from satellite-connected locations in Cairo (the Pyramids), Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. If you will be in one of these cities, you can apply for free tickets; if not, you can make plans to attend any of the over 1300 other screenings -- in homes, movie theatres and larger venues -- that have already been listed on the Pangea Day site, a list that keeps growing. Or even better, you can host your own Pangea Day event for your friends: all you will need is a large TV screen, and the right channel access or a good Internet connection.
OK, if you've penciled the date in your calendar, let's now make a step back: what is this about? Pangea Day was born out of filmmaker Jehane Noujaim's speech at the TED conference in 2006. Two years earlier, Jehane had directed "Control Room", the controversial documentary following events at Al Jazeera at the beginning of the Irak war. "I don't know if a film can change the world", she said at TED, "but I believe it has the
ability to take you across borders, into another world, and maybe that
has the ability to transform" (watch her speech here, or read my blog summary). And if films cannot change the world, the people watching them certainly can. So she wished for "a day when the world comes together through film", called Pangea, from the time when all the continents were still together in one single landmass.
The idea has grown into a giant global project, with the support of TED; of TED patrons Shawn and Brooke Byers and countless other TEDsters; of personalities such as JJ Abrams ("Lost") and Forest Whitaker ("The Last King Of Scotland"), Judy McGrath (CEO of MTV), architect Richard Rogers and singer Paul Simon, among many others that joined the incredible advisory board; of more personalities such as Queen Noor of Jordan and CNN star reporter Christiane Amanpour (both will talk), Brazilian singer Gilberto Gil and Iranian rock phenomenon Hypernova (both will sing live); of main sponsor Nokia and of partners MSN, Akamai, AvenueA/Razorfish and others; of dozens of broadcasters (including CurrentTV in the US, StarTV all over China/India/Asia, MGM Networks in Latin America, Sky in the UK, Canal+/Planete in France, several in the Middle East, in Indonesia, in Mexico and many more -- covering over 100 countries); and of thousands of people around the world who have signed up to host a screening, to promote Pangea, or have submitted their own videos for consideration.
Because -- and here we come to what will happen during the four hours -- part of the content of Pangea Day has been produced by people like you and me, over 2500 of them from over 100 countries, who have uploaded their videos to the Pangea site. 20+ have been selected to be shown during the broadcast, ranging in length from 2 to 15 minutes. They are, by turns, funny, touching, dramatic and inspiring, and they all tell powerful stories, often without using words, of what it is to be human.
There will also be videos produced by professionals. Plus, the day will feature a dozen powerful three-minutes inspiring talks by planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, lebanese soidier Assaad Chaftari, anthropologist Donald Brown, actor Khaled Aboul Naga, African entrepreneur June Arunga, and others, including Queen Noor and Amanpour.
Yes, I know some among you are already shaking their head: ah, another warm and idealistic peace fest. But -- aside from the fact that, well, when exactly did idealism become a bad thing? -- here is why I believe Pangea Day will be worth your time and effort: because the world needs, urgently needs, a big infusion of "us", a spark that can start a truly global conversation, a growing sense that there is something we all share, and it's the only thing that matters: our humanity.
I'm not -- none of us in the TED and Pangea teams is -- under the illusion that Pangea Day will start an outbreak of global peace. But telling stories through film -- a universal language that often doesn't need words to pass on a message -- is especially powerful. Moreover, during Pangea Day you won't just be watching videos (and hearing speakers and listening to great music): you will also be watching the world watching, seeing how the other audiences at the other end of the planet will act and react. As TED curator Chris Anderson
wrote recently in an e-mail, "Some use the language of promoting global
citizenship, or reducing cross-cultural suspicion, or expanding our
circle of empathy, or eliminating the "us/them" mode of thinking. These
goals are all linked, and any progress towards them is a big deal".
The event -- "hosted" in English but realized in seven languages -- will take place 11am-3pm on the US West Coast, 2-6pm on the US East Coast, 7-11pm in the UK, 8pm-midnight in Europe and much of Africa, 9pm-1am in the Mideast, 11:30pm-3am in India, etc.
Now, if I still haven't convinced you that Pangea Day will be worth your time, maybe some of this will. This is the Pangea trailer:
The next one is a viral Pangea short video that debuted at TED this year, an invitation to see things differently, to consider also the other's point of view, based on the images of the famous scene of the unarmed young man carrying shopping bags who stood in front of
the tanks on Tienanmen Square, on 5 June 1989, blocking them. The young
man has remained anonymous. So did the soldier driving the tank:
There are also the US singing for Mexico, Australia singing for Lebanon, Japan singing for Turkey, UK singing for Argentina. There is plenty more: a Facebook group, communities on MySpace and Ovi, t-shirts and stickers, information on how to host a screening and how to watch online. On May 10, the YouTube homepage will be turned into a PangeaDay hub. And just to give you a sense of who else will be watching and experiencing Pangea with you around the world, here a few lines from the most recent status report I got from the fabulous Pangea team, led by Delia Cohen: hosts in Bogotà, Colombia, expect 25'000 people in an outdoor plaza; Pangea Day will be featured on opening night of the Stuttgart Night Lectures in Germany; The Buffalo International Film Festival will host Pangea Day in the historic Riviera Theatre there; There will be a gathering on an "open grass field" in Woodstock, NY (yes, that Woodstock); Tawandang German Brewery in Bangkok will host a screening for 500; Teachers and students in San Salvador, El Salvador, will gather to watch. Ah, and Karin in San Francisco will be hosting an event on her rooftop terrace and serving Pangea cakes. Karin who? Well, you will need to find out by yourselves.
Nor will Pangea end with the end of the broadcast: it will be followed by community-building activities around the world, local events, more videos and films, open online forums, a Pangea documentary, and more.
Where will I be on May 10? I will be acting as the TED "ambassador" at the London event. So if you plan to be there, do come up and say hello and let's watch some great videos together.
Laurent Haug (and originally Kara Swisher) on early adopters tools and media vs mass tools and media: "the intense obsession with the hottest new services like Twitter and FriendFeed, in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, and no one else cares yet".
Great essay by Michael Pollan in the NYT Magazine on the immense disproportion between the magnitude of the climate change problem and the apparent inconsequence of individual "solutions" (change light bulbs etc), and why we must act anyway.
In an historic vote, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard moved to make the articles that its members publish in scholarly journals freely available to anyone online. (Thx Susan for the link)
The Global Footprint Network has put a new calculator on their website. For now it only covers the US and Australia, but more countries will be added. Push the button on top right to make the calculator fill the screen.
LIFT Asia will take place in South Korea 4-6 Sept 2008. Themes: Beyond the Web we know; Networked cities; Near future; Virtual money; Green tech; and more. Registrations will open soon.
The first two paragraphs from a long Newsweek story about locally-generated power:
In the late 1990s, the town of Freiamt in Germany's Black Forest decided to take the fight against global warming into its own hands. Three hundred of the town's 4,300 residents chipped in to buy the four 80-meter-tall Enercon wind turbines that now top the surrounding hills, generating 1.8 megawatts each. An additional 270 families put solar collectors on their roofs to heat water and power their homes. Three businesses—two sawmills and a bakery—whose land abuts a gurgling stream have installed old-fashioned water wheels, each providing an additional 15 kilowatts.
To make up for shortfalls when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow, one of the local farmers invested in a "biogas" fermenter, which uses enzymes to turn grain and agricultural waste such as manure and chaff into methane. The gas, in turn, fires up an electricity generator. And rather than simply release heat given off in the process into the air, as conventional power plants do, the generator pumps the waste heat into nearby homes, where it's used for water and space heating, through pipes laid by volunteers. But the prize for Freiamt's most creative source of energy surely goes to Walter Schneider, a local dairy farmer. To harness the energy set free when the milk from his 50 cows is chilled before transport, Schneider installed a heat exchanger that uses the heat from the cow's milk to warm the water he needs for cleaning and showering. Today, the Freiamters are proudly self-sufficient. What's more, in 2007 they generated an extra 2.3 million kilowatt-hours beyond the 12 million they consumed. They sold the surplus, enough for an additional 200 homes, back to the national grid.
While the journalist forgot to put a caveat on that "self-sufficient" by mentioning that the town still "imports" the gas needed to run cars and trucks (although -- just thinking aloud -- it could well be offset by the 2.3 mil Kwh of extra clean energy production), this is pretty amazing. Freiamt is not far from the Swiss border, I may pay a visit this Summer.
A must-read piece in "Time" by Michael Grunwald, on the misguided ethanol policies of the US and the EU and their trail of devastating deforestation, rising food prices, economic interests and social unrests.
The other day in London I spent some time with Richard Bernstein, the brilliant CEO of Eurovestech, a fund investing in tech startups in Europe.
But we didn't only discuss tech ideas and entreprises: we talked charity. Richard is the man behind an intriguing new form for making donations to non-profits. I first learned about it last December, when 100'000 shares of Eurovestech were donated to the small non-profit I co-founded, Friends of Humanity, in Geneva.
The principle is simple: instead of donating cash, Eurovestech -- which is publicly listed on the London stock exchange -- issues new company shares in batches of 100'000 and gives them to charitable organizations. They are then of course free to sell them immediately or hold on to them waiting for a higher valuation. From Eurovestech's point of view, it costs only a fraction of what it would have cost to give the same amount in cash. From the recipient's point of view, it's a significant amount of money with a potentially interesting additional upside, depending on the share's value evolution.
There is, of course, a "hidden" cost: dilution. Simplifying, it means that every time the number of shares of Eurovestech grows, all shares are worth a bit less. A tiny bit less, actually: 100'000 extra shares are almost negligible compared to the 344 million shares that comprise Eurovestech's capital. "I believe that a dilution of 0.2 % per annum is absolutely invisible: it's basically a rounding error", Richard told me.
Over the last 7 years, Richard's company has donated a total of 8.2 million ordinary shares to some 73 different charitable and non-profit organizations, amounting to a stock market value of roughly 1.9 million euros. And Eurovestech is just a small company. But Richard wants now to encourage other companies to do the same. He's done the maths: "If all the companies on the FTSE-100 gave 0.1% of their shares every year, that would amount to almost 1.8 billion euros", he says. "Now apply that to all the other listed companies".
He is a believer in corporate responsibility not as a marketing tool but as "an intrinsic duty to be a good citizen and do the right thing". Richard has already convinced other companies to follow suit -- one of which has already allocated 5 million euros worth of shares for charity. He is now in the process of setting up an organization, called Share And Share Alike, which will raise awareness of and promote this approach, centralize share donations, and distribute them. He hopes to be able to convince companies all over Europe to start donating shares. "I'm ready to go to see any CEO, in any company, anywhere in Europe to explain how it works and show how easily it can be done from the company's point of view", he said.
Legally, he says, for listed companies this is easily done. The Board can issue shares. The decision must be communicated to the markets and be filed according to regulations, but that's pretty much it. Although legally this is not necessary, some companies may chose to get shareholder approval at the annual meeting -- to make it into a shareholder-approved policy.
Richard: "I want to get to the point where it's embarrassing for a company not to be "sharing alike"...".
A journey into the mind and methods of Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the "Tipping Point": interesting discussion of the origin of the concept and the difference between economic and epidemiological tipping points.(NY Press; thx PM)
Cool picture of tunicates, mysterious creatures looking like glass tulips up to 1 meter high that have been found by explorers in the icy waters of Antarctica. (National Geographic)
If you read French, Flore Vasseur of the "Le Monde" newspaper has probably best captured the spirit of this year's TED conference in her great report from Monterey.
Among the many attempts to develop new business models for quality online media -- from ProPublica's philanthropic funding to MediaPart's subscription-only to the FT's finite-free -- a new Swiss site launching today offers a novel and intriguing approach.
Swisster (tagline: "local news, global views") is a Swiss English-language site that will cover business, finance, politics, science&tech and lifestyle stories "with a regional twist", says editor Christophe Rasch. Switzerland has four national languages, but English is not one of them. It is becoming one in fact, though, being increasingly spoken daily in banks, multinational corporations, academic and media organizations, design and advertising firms, and well beyond. It's now commonplace in Switzerland to find English-language national advertising campaigns or English-named stores and products and sports clubs. But this hasn't yet translated into national locally-produced English-language media (although the average newsstand carries a generous variety of British, US and international -- Monocle, IHT, WSJE, etc -- publications).
This situation has been slowly evolving in recent years, with the likes of Swissinfo and World Radio Switzerland (a web site and a radio channel produced by Swiss Public Broadcasting), or with the launch of the "English corners" on newspaper websites such as Geneva's Tribune de Genève and Basle's Basler Zeitung, and of independent sites such as GenevaLunch.
Now Swisster wants to fill the vacuum (Disclosure: LunchOverIP will be featured on the site's blog section). "Our core target are the 100'000 expatriates or Swiss who live in Western Switzerland (the Lake Geneva region) and use English as their main daily work language. Later -- we plan to go national with our coverage within two years -- we will also reach out to the 300'000 in the rest of the country", says Rasch.
Although impressive for Switzerland, these are small figures, which explains in part why no significant national English-language news outlet has existed so far. It also explains why Rasch and his team are adopting a very unusual business approach to make Swisster economically viable. The site of course carries advertising. The rest of the revenue will come from a particular, and daring, form of subscription. "Our potential market is a niche", says the editor, "and the people in that niche can be generally found in big organizations". Swisster is published by Edipresse, one of Switzerland's top-three publishers, and SNP, the Swiss branch of France's Hersant, but counts a number of other "founding members", big multinational corporations, leading private banks such as LODH, and academic institutions such as EPFL, which have contributed to the initial funding and will contribute to developing the readership by buying subscriptions in bulk and distributing the accounts among their executives and staffers (and their families). While anyone will be able to subscribe individually -- yearly subs will cost a rather steep 300 CHF apiece -- Swisster will focus primarily on selling group subscriptions to big companies and organizations, where its target readers work.
Additional twist: the general (non-paying) public will also have access to the site, but only to the stories that are 48 hours old or older (and some stories will never be "free access"). Subscribers will instead receive breaking news, daily news, newsletters, service information (from detailed information on snow conditions on the Alpine slopes to housing info) and have access to a social-networking platform. Partnerships are also being established, including one with TimesOnline, the web site of the UK's The Times.
Swisster will be produced initially by an editorial staff of 6, based in Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich, and Edipresse has been able to attract professionals with both significant journalistic experience (they come from the Economist, the Guardian,Reuters etc) and a good knowledge of Switzerland. "Editorial independence is guaranteed", Rasch stresses when we argue that the chosen business model will put it under pressure: "the founding members have committed for several years and will have no say on our editorial choices".
Says Janet Ginsburg: "A full year before the CDC reported cases of paralysis in West Nile patients, cases had been reported in veterinary journals in large mammals. Nevermind that humans are, in fact, large mammals, doctors don't have time to read veterinarian journals and vice-versa".
There are similar examples in just about every field, and that's why Ginsburg -- a former BusinessWeek science reporter with extensive experience in covering things like biosurveillance -- has been working with InSTEDD (see this previous post) to imagine a way to cross these silos of expertise and promote cross-disciplinary awareness and collaboration. "Though specialization has led to a greater aggregate knowledge, gaps between disciplines mean missed opportunities and potential dangers", she told me the other day. The answer: the Humanitarian Technology Review (HTR -- not the final name), an attempt to provide experts across a range of fields -- and across the world -- a place to learn about each other's work, and to connect.
If this sounds generic, the fields that the HTR will cover aren't: early disease detection, predictive modeling and simulation, mobile communications, transportation, water and sanitation, green tech, climate change impacts, machine translation, vaccines, crisis management, food security, resilience and recovery, energy, chronic disease, microbiology, just to mention a few.
What connects these fields? The HTR defines technology broadly: "anything and everything that can make a difference". One of the key points is that "disease and disaster are most often viewed as separate issues, and handled by different agencies and specialists". Yet, there is no humanitarian crisis without a health component, or a serious disease outbreak without a humanitarian dimension. Likewise, "most human diseases are zoonotic, meaning they also affect animals; animal and human health are two sides of the same coin. And regional disasters can quickly go global, while global events can have devastating local consequences".
These intersections are increasingly frequent and producing severe impacts. The HTR is an attempt to mix and match ideas and innovations that can lead to better answers. "Some of the most promising developments in the field over the last few years are the result of inspired combinations", is stated in the Review's project documents. For instance:
The core of the HTR will be an electronic newsletter and website, which will be complemented with videos, blogs, podcasts, downloadable software and tools, translation and mapping programs, etc (plus print and events) -- whatever platform can serve its mission.
Here is a PDF describing the project. Initiated by InSTEDD, the Review will be editorially independent. For more details and an account of the HTR's genesis, see this post on Ginsburg's blog.
Video of Boston Dynamics' BigDog quadruped robot, being researched for the US Army. Moves like an actual dog -- keep watching after it walks out of the forest, when it walks on ice etc. Amazing. (thx DL for the link)
...this is the site. Oobject "charts" things like ghost particle detectors, nuclear-powered transportation, welding masks, time-lapse Wii videos, concept folding bikes and spectacular wind tunnels -- among many others. (Thx Isaiah for the link)
The trailer (in French) of this year's edition of the Forum des 100, the annual one-day conference I'm producing with newsmagazine L'Hebdo in Lausanne. The Forum gathers 650 entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, artists and media types from Western Switzerland (the conference takes place in French). This year's gathering -- the fourth -- will go under the theme "Creativity/Competitiveness" and among the featured speakers will be Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Italian carmaker Fiat; Swiss federal minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf; the director of the ECAL design school Pierre Keller; and Swatch co-creator Elmar Mock. Here are the summaries of the Forums of 2006 and 2007. The trailer (2min40) is available on YouTube as well as Vimeo. It was realized by Swiss podcaster Thierry Weber.
US newspaper websites are starting to post MP3 files of presidential campaign conference calls online, for everybody to listen -- if you're really a political wonk: they tend to be self-serving exercises in extended spin by the campaigns. (Wired)
During this year's session of the National People's Congress, the Communist party has used cell phones to promote "democracy with Chinese characteristics". Question: if you can SMS a question to the prime minister, are you in a democracy?
Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer? Seed magazine's story on the Blue Brain project at EPFL is finally available on their site.
Volume of digital info created and replicated globally in 2007: 281 billion gigabytes, or 45 GB per person on Earth. The volume of info about us generated automatically surpasses the volume of info that we actively create about ourselves. (ArsTechnica)
Great post by John Thackara: Traveling without moving has become an economic and environmental imperative. It is cheaper to move information, than people or things. So what is to stop us moving less, and and tele-communicating more?
Excerpt from my friend Misha Glenny's new book "McMafia": Think of drugs, and you think of Colombia, Thailand, Afghanistan. But Canada? There are parts of the country where cannabis provides more jobs than logging, mining, oil and gas combined.
Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the 
There are similar examples in just about every field, and that's why Ginsburg -- a former BusinessWeek science reporter with extensive experience in covering things like biosurveillance -- has been working with InSTEDD (see 
Recent Comments