Comment: Blockbuster session was gloomiest

Nov 20 2008 by Herb Kim for The Journal

CAMDEN, Maine, is four hours north of Boston and is a pretty long way from anything. And yet, it remains the annual home of the Pop!Tech Conference which attracts 600 of some of the best and brightest technologists, intellectuals and social engineers from around the world.

Having been fortunate enough to represent the North East’s digital sector at the conference, and to meet potential speakers for our very own version of Pop!Tech, Thinking Digital, I’m glad to say that this year was no exception.

Malcolm Gladwell has become extraordinarily well known for his books - The Tipping Point and Blink. This year he previewed his new book – Outliers – for delegates.

Gladwell focused particularly on something called the “capitalisation rate”, which is a phrase roughly denoting a society’s ability to capitalise on the talent within its population.

Among other things, he highlighted how hockey and football teams around the world are strangely dominated by children born in the first half of the year. Could it be that children born between January and June are simply superior athletes, or is it because cut-off dates around the world tend to be on January 1, which means that the most developed children trying out for sports teams will happen to be born earlier in the year?

Elsewhere, in what was perhaps the strongest single session of the conference, we heard talks from Chris Anderson of Wired magazine, Matt Mason, formerly of The Guardian and the author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, and NYU Professor, Clay Shirky.

Shirky has become a well-known author due to his recent book Here Comes Everybody. In his presentation he gave the fascinating example of how an internet-based philanthropy group formed in the name of a US pop singer was able to raise far more money and then eventually overwhelm the “official” philanthropy group formed the by singer’s very own managers.

The blockbuster session of the conference, though, was also its most depressing. Juan Enriquez, the author of The Untied States of America and a biotech investor by day, delivered a withering presentation about the size of the problem facing the global economy.

He did a brilliant job of stringing together the various chunks of data floating around and made it very clear that we face an awesome task ahead of us. Fortunately, Juan believes that we must absolutely continue to invest in R&D and innovation.

Unfortunately, he also believes that we must embrace austerity for some time. His talk, while deeply worrying, is well worth downloading. You can catch it at www.poptech.org/juanenriquez

Herb Kim is CEO of Codeworks, the North East centre for digital innovation.