I had the honor of attending TEDxBoston 2011. While I was lucky enough to speak at TEDxChange Nashville, and I watch many TED Talks on-line, this is the first time I was able to settle in for an entire TED program and devote my full attention to all of the talks.
As you would expect, the ideas are big, and the solutions inspiring. My favorite talks were:
Joe Coughlin - Aging as an Extreme Sport
As the number of seniors continues to grow, a new understanding is needed about how environments will need to be reconfigured for their needs. He demoed a suit that a person can wear that makes it feel like you are 80 years old. It turns everyday movements like walking stairs, bending down, picking up objects into a struggle and brings perspective. The take away is that unless you manufacture empathy, it can be hard to design real solutions.
Lisa Gross - Civic Fruit
Lisa gave a very articulate and fun talk about a movement in Boston around planting pairs of apple trees throughout public spaces. It is part public art project, part green movement, part political expression, part food bank. You have to struggle to find reasons why planting fruit trees throughout the city is a bad idea. What I like about this idea is that it starts small, but it scales by inspiring local communities to take up the cause. You no longer just need Lisa going around planting, but you have schools, and churches, and towns all over the region doing their own planting.
Erez Lieberman AIden & Jean-Baptiste Michel - A Picture is Worth 500 Billion Words
Google has digitized 15 million books. By analyzing the usage of text throughout the ages, it provides an interesting and humorous look at the evolution of our culture. It is amazing the types of patterns you can detect through this type of big-data analysis. You can see things like censorship, proliferation of diseases, and the adoption rate of technology... and that is just text. Imagine when everything is digitized? What patterns will we see then?
Dr. Bo Pomahac - Face the Future
This was the first talk of the day, and it was a crazy one about actual facial transplants. When significantly destroyed, the face is far to complex to reconstruct through plastic surgery. The new alternative is a complete facial transplant. The fact that this is even possible is a scientific wonder. I really like the statement that, while this procedure is risky and it isn't life saving, it is life giving.
Richard Resnick - The Next Hot Commoditiy of Genone Sequences
This was my favorite talk of the day because it was so mind blowing. The cost of sequencing someones entire genome is falling dramatically. This allows for unprecedented clarity assessing mutations that cause disease and building custom medicine to repair it in our individual bodies. It was a big deal when the human genome project was complete, but now that amount of work can be done in less than a week, and soon it will happen in less than a day. Get ready for a revolution in bio-tech that very few people see coming.
My main take away was this: You just have to start doing something. Most of the TED Talks were about people who just started doing something small... and that small thing served as inspiration to the larger thing... or served as inspiration to a larger number of people. Given my work in on-line software, I spend a lot of time thinking about how you get systems to scale... but the beauty of many of the ideas and solutions presented at TED is that no one ever cared about scale when they started... they just started doing it... and it grew from there.
I guess what I am saying is that you could start two types of business. The first type is a consulting business where you build websites for others. This does not scale... because there is only one you... so you can only build as many sites as you have hours in the day. No more no less unless you hire more people... but then you can only keep them assuming you continue to get business at the same pace. The business does not auto-scale up and down.
The second type of business would be an on-line service. You spend the time upfront building the service, then people pay $20 a month to use it. Sure if you get a million people suddenly, you would need to scale that, but then you would have 20 million dollars to do it. The business would auto scale and you just have to provide operational support.
So given those two examples, most TED ideas seem to be the former... a single person just out there doing something. They rarely seem to get to the scale level... but does that matter? Probably not if inspiration is your goal. Can we go beyond inspiration? How many scalable ways are there to save the world?
Comments