PopTech Videos: PopCasts

Jay Keasling, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, grew up on a farm in Nebraska where his father raised corn. He decided to apply his past to what he’d been doing for years, engineering microbes to produce chemicals. He’s turned his attention to solving the world’s energy crisis, using plants to engineer clean-burning fuels that will replace oil.

“They call me the real life batman. My claim to fame is that I click,” explains Daniel Kish. His organization, World Access for the Blind, trains the visually impaired to achieve greater freedom through echolocation, a technique that simulates a bat’s night vision of perceiving the environment through sound.

We are in the midst of a great realignment – a series of connected and converging revolutions in technology, economics, ecology, energy, geopolitics and culture that mark the end of one global era and the beginning of another. The world is rebalancing. PopTech 2011 will look ahead at the new rule sets, opportunities and imperatives that this great rebalancing might bring, and it’s about to begin.

Unity Dow, a lawyer, high court justice in Botswana and novelist, describes seismic generational shifts between pre- and post-independence Africans. She asks how the identity shifts of the next generation will change the dynamics of the world stage and what that means for Americans, many of whom are working with outdated paradigms in a world rebalancing.

Tony Orrico, visual artist, performer, and choreographer, uses his own body to inscribe geometries on paper. Through physically exhausting performances involving highly choreographed motions, Orrico explores line and shape with his actual body, creating works of visual art that record his own motion.

Sarah Fortune, TB expert, and Lukas Biewald, CEO of the crowdsourcing start-up, Crowdflower, pair up through PopTech to crowdsource a task best done by the human eye: cataloging TB’s bacterial cells. This collaboration has the potential to democratize the economics of science and basic scientific discovery.

Robert Neuwirth tells us about life in the informal economy, what French culture classifies as System D. 1.8 billion people on the planet subsist through economic transactions that happen outside legal spheres and, by 2020, two thirds of our planet will be doing business in this domain. The future is the free market vs. the flea market.

Patrick Tresset and Frederic Fol Leymarie direct the Aikon-II project, which uses computational modeling and robotics to replicate the sketching performed by a human hand.

Milenko Matanovic is a community builder and visual artist. He describes his journey from pure artist to facilitator, working with the betterment of the community in mind. Through his organization, The Pomegranate Center, Matanovic guides the conception and construction of open-air gathering places, involving the community in all phases of the project.

Shima’a Helmy joins filmmakers and friends Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton onstage at PopTech to talk about their collaboration on an upcoming documentary film, If. The film explores what it’s like being a young revolutionary through the eyes of four different Egyptian women, including Helmy.

Jan Chipchase, head of research for frog Design, talks about the process behind his company’s acclaimed work. Chipchase and his team spend weeks on the ground, living with participants and observing the activities and rules of their daily lives. The result is a process of drilling down to the essence of an experience before even beginning to design it.

Collaborators Reuben Margolin, a kinetic sculptor and Gideon Obarzanek, a choreographer, met at the 2009 PopTech conference. They instantly bonded over the shared themes in their respective mediums and began creating a piece together called “Connected.” Their collaborative effort, a couple of years in the making, is now touring worldwide.

Erik Hersman asks us to shed outdated notions of Africa as a unified place plagued by starvation and war. Between mobile phone innovations like M-PESA, social networking like MXit and entrepreneurial spaces like Maker Faire Africa, Hersman sees innovation and entrepreneurship exploding within some of Africa’s—and the world’s—fastest growing economies.

eL Seed is a French artist who creates large-scale works of art combining the vernacular of street art with Arabic calligraphy. What he calls “Calligraffiti” is his response to both his role as an Arabic artist in a Western-dominated art world as well as his role as an artist of the “streets.”

Scott Saponas and Desney Tan both work at Microsoft Research where their latest project, called Skinput, focuses on allowing richer, more natural ways of interacting with our ubiquitous technology devices. They envision a day when you can change your music, learn a language, and even answer email using bio-acoustics on the touch-sensitive surfaces of our bodies.