A Personal Invitation to Future in Review 2008

“The best technology conference
in the world.” – The Economist

To All SNS Members and Friends:

I am writing to invite you to join me at Future in Review 2008.

What do you get when you merge the world’s best technology newsletter with the world’s best technology conference? New friendships, ideas, projects, and plans you can’t afford to miss. If your success depends upon having an accurate view of the future, there is no other conference in the world better than FiRe.

This year FiRe will be at the Hotel del Coronado, San Diego, from May 20-23, where we’ll again be joined by the world business press, including the BBC World News and their 150MM listeners.. If you don’t need to read any further, just register at www.futureinreview.com, and we’ll see you soon.

Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling will be our annual Looking Further interview, and Technology Officers Shane Robison (EVP and Chief Strategy and Tech Officer, Hewlett-Packard), Per-Kristian Halvorsen (Intuit), Justin Rattner (Intel) and Prith Banerjee (Head, HP Labs) will sharpen our focus on near-term future events in chips, computing, imaging and software.

We have a Super Wireless Communications thread this year, with panels led by experts Chetan Sharma (Author, Mobile Advertising) and Rajeev Chand (Managing Director/Wireless Analyst, Rutberg & Co.), joined by a superb panel on High-Performance Computing assembled by in-house expert John Thompson.

I am pleased to note that we have extended time set this year to visit the “FiRe Lab,” Larry Smarr’s amazing set of Calit2 supercomputing / supervisualization laboratories at UCSD.

Nobelist Lee Hartwell (President, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) will lead off a strong discussion team on Fixing Healthcare, a FiRe thread now moving into full public attention. Contributors include Human Genome Sciences founder William Haseltine (Chair, Haseltine Global Health), Drugstore.com founder Peter Neupert (Corp. VP, Microsoft Health Solutions Group), and FiReStarters Ido and Roy Schoenberg, CEOs at American Well.

Realizing that the Climate Crisis is moving faster than our science, we have themed this year’s conference “Rapid Response.” We are going “beyond green” and working on what can be done soonest, knowing that time is not on our side.

Given this focus, I am pleased to announce that venture capitalist and entrepreneur Vinod Khosla will provide our opening-night talk. Vinod was the first VC in the Valley to really “get” alternative and clean energy, and today his many continuing investments are proof of his prescience.

We’ll be showcasing an amazing set of entrepreneurs, companies, and technologies on this theme, including Jerry Woodall (the Purdue prof who discovered how to generate hydrogen using aluminum and gallium), Yi Cui (the Stanford prof who is trying to make super Lithium batteries using silicon nanotubes), Erik Blachford (CEO of TerraPass),David Morris (CEO of FiRe Spotlight winner EcoVerdance), Alan Gotcher (CEO, Altairnano), Elon Musk (bringing us the newest Tesla electric sedan car, large Solarcity installations, and ­ we’re betting ­ a successful new SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket launch), and Martin Tobias, with tales from Biodiesel wars with the entrenched producers. —

— While Warburg Pincus’ Bill Janeway explores near-term economic problems, and their effect on our ability to make this Rapid Response happen.

In addition to solar, hydrogen, lithium, agriculture (Lanier Davenport, Founder, Accelegrow), and clean water (Alan Cummings and Christopher Cooper, Founders of FiReStarter Seldon Technologies), we will also apply technology to fighting wildfires with sci-fi author and physicist David Brin and Larry Smarr, director of Calit2, UCSD.

Those of you who have attended FiRe already know what a transforming experience it is. If you haven’t come yet, make this the year you see the light, perhaps during our party on the Del’s famous beach, with 200 of your closest future friends.

“Enhance vision, reduce risk, increase effectiveness.”

I hope you will join me for FiRe 2008.

Sincerely,

Mark R. Anderson
Chairman, Future in Review 2008 and
CEO, Strategic News Service

A special thanks to our Silver Sponsors Hewlett-Packard and Mohr Davidow Ventures, and to the Rodel Foundations.