HotSpots: Personal Views of the Future
Hosted by Lesley Curwen, Host, “Business Daily,” BBC World Service:
- Jin Zidell: Founder and Chairman, Blue Planet Network
- 5,000 children under age 5 die every day from dehydration and chronic diarrhea from unsafe drinking water
- 200 million hours every day are spent by women and girls fetching clean drinking water
- For $30, one person can drink clean water for life
- Blue Planet Network: Global online platform and tool set connects funders, NGOs and communities with partners all over the world
- No economic or political battles
- André de Fusco: CEO and Director, Cynvenio Biosystems
- Implications of genomic work
- Longevity: fairly long lives are at hand; 150 years is within reach, whether or not it’s desirable
- No problems maintaining our homes, but when it comes to our health, we don’t do as much
- Cynvenio is focused on the genomic aspects of disease: Looking at cell DNA to predict what they’re going to do
- Longer lives will mean we maintain our institutional knowledge
- Alexander Gounares: Founder and CEO, Concurix
- Mini core revolution: quiet revolution going in in software
- Suddenly with cloud, things are changing. You can buy what used to be a whole data center for $300,000 worth of cloud that fits in a refrigerator
- We’ll see companies making the shift to mini core that have an order of magnitude price advantage over their peers
- This will be a fundamental revolution in the next 5-10 years
- David Garrison: CEO, iBAHN
- We’re at the beginning of the 3rd communications revolution
- 1st: Intro of telephone; 2nd: Intro of internet
- 3rd:
- very low cost mobile networks, primarily WiFi (cheaper than 3G)
- social networks that connect people without a relationship
- very powerful, video-centric handheld devices
- These will change the way we interact with other people, other ideas
- The problem with information today: we have no context for information
- With video, services like Yelp will give more context
- These three factors will lead us to a new way of interacting with people that we can’t foresee today
- Hugh Bradlow: CTO, Telstra
- We’re about to enter a new era of economic productivity
- cloudification: proliferation of cloud
- omniscience: being able to know and act on everything
- Omnipresence: thanks to ultrahigh speed broadband and new screen technologies means we can essentially transport ourselves
- Revolution could be brought to a screaming halt by the failure to develop better batteries
- John Vadino: One to the World
- In the US, we’re going to need to add 20 million college graduates
- Parents started using Khan Academy videos to understand new math
- Corporations sponsor search for 10,000 best STEM teachers, put their classes online
- Leave government and schools out of it