TED2007: Betting on good people doing good things, and a "virtually embedded" filmmaker

Running notes from the TED2007 conference in Monterey, California - Session 8 (TED site; backgrounder; past TED videos; other bloggers at TED)

TEDster Nick Sears from NYU shows a contraption that simulates 70'000 LEDs using only 64. Interesting potential for volumetric displays.

JJ Abrams is the inventor of "Lost" and "Alias", two of the most successful TV series of the last few years. Why do mysteries attract us so much? He pulls out a cardboard box, a "magic mystery box" that he bought when he was a kid with his grandfather in the Tannen mystery store in New York, for 15 dollars, and has kept it and never opened it. I've been wondering why I never opened it, he says, and realized that it represents potential, hope, infinite possibility. It represents the difference between what you think you're getting and what you really get. (He does not open it). In everything I do, I am drawn by infinite possibilities. Mystery is more important that knowledge. My Apple laptop challenges me. He tells me: what are you gonna write that will be worthy of me? The blank page is a magic box. He shows a clip from the pilot episode of "Lost" (the moments after the plane crashes in the island) which was done in 12 weeks, with the help of technology, and discusses the fact that creation is easier today not only for professionals but for everyone.

TEDster Jakob Trollback, CEO of Trollback & Co in New York, a branding and design studio, shows a visualization of a Brian Eno/David Byrne song dealing with rising waters (Noah's Ark) and religion, while Tim Sarnoff of Sony Imageworks (the company that did the special effects for the "Spiderman" movie) gives a preview of their latest animation comedy, "Surf's Up", with animal characters engaged in competitive surfing, which will be released in June, and explains how they created parts of it.

Dotcom executive becomes billionaire, goes to Hollywood to make movies and, surprise, the movies don't suck. That's Jeff Skoll, who was one of the founders (and first fulltime employee) of eBay, and went on to take his money and found Participant Productions (which co-produced movies such as "Good Night, and Good Luck", "Fast food nation" and "An Inconvenient Truth" - read this post to see how they decide what projects to support). What drives me, he says, is a vision of the future that we probably all share, a world of prosperity and sustainability. And I think that we realize how far we have to go to get to that phase of humanity -- "humanity 2.0". Two big calamities in the world today: the gap in opportunities, and the hope gap. There is this weird idea that an ordinary individual could not make a difference in the world, but within each of us there is the potential to fill these gaps.
He tells of launching eBay and going "from living in a house with 5 guys in Palo Alto and living off their leftovers, to have serious money". He says of asking John Gardner on how best to use this fortune and getting as an answer: "Bet on good people doing good things". So he started the Skoll Foundation to support social entrepreneurs. Participant Productions came out of the idea of using storytelling for the public interest. In 2003 I started to go around Hollywood to talk about a "social media company". I was told over and over that the streets of Hollywood being paved with people like me. But PP started with the idea of not only doing movies but also getting involved in the issues (there are activism and advocacy programs that accompany the movies online). "North Country", with Charlize Theron, about harassment, may have played a role in the renewal of the US  "Violence against women" Act. About Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth", he says they decided to do it immediately after having seen Gore's slideshow about climate change, but that they thought it would be a documentary destined to niche television channels -- instead, it got an Oscar and is changing the debate on climate change.
At PP they're now preparing two movies about Afghanistan (one about Charles Wilson, a US politician who supported the Taliban to fight against the Soviets; the other from the "Kite Runner" bestselling book). He closes by dreaming up some headlines for 2010 or 2015: "US imports its last barrel of oil", "Snows return to Kilimanjaro", "Israeli and Palestinians celebrate anniversary of peace", and a screenshot from eBay: "Well-traveled obsolete slideshow for sale" -- that's Al Gore's, of course.

TEDster Paul Koontz, a VC, shows pictures of his trip to North Korea, a world of absurdity. One image shows a multiple-time-zones clock with only two time zones: Pyongyang and Havana. Another a policewoman directing the traffic in the middle of a giant crossing -- but there are no cars. He shows a short video from the "Mass Games" that are performed in the stadium, involving tens of thousands of performers organizing massive mosaics by turning colored pages of books and holding them up to compose giant images (like the one showing the soldier and the "dear leaders" in the backdrop in the picture at right -- which is not from Paul's presentation, but was taken by Reinhard Krause). The perfection of the extravagant performance as seen in Paul's video is amazing, so maybe  he's right in comparing it to "a giant communist display" where "every performer is basically a pixel". (You don't want to be the broken pixel).

Deborah Scranton is the filmmaker of "The War Tapes": she gave cameras to US infantry soldiers in Iraq in 2004 asking them to film their war life, and basically directed the movie via e-mail and instant messaging -- a unique collaborative film (see the trailer). She calls the approach "virtual embed": a novel way to tell a story in video from the inside out, rather than observing from the outside  in, as in traditional documentary-making. She shows scenes from the movie, and tells the backstory. One of the most profound stories: A soldier came up to me and he looked at me and I smiled and I saw the tear starting hi his eye and he told me about killing a child who got too close to the vehicle and was run over, "I'm a father, and I'm afraid to tell my wife because she may think that I'm a monster". She sees this as exhibit A in a disconnect between the lives of soldiers and those of the other Americans.
Scranton is now using a similar approach to tell the story of the US-Mexico border, putting cameras into the hands of the border patrol, ranchers, humanitarians who leave water in the desert trying to save lives, smugglers, and illegal immigrants themselves. 

David Pogue, the NY Times' tech columnist revealed last year his talents as a comedian - watch video or read summary - is offered a mini-slot of three minutes that he uses to play a "history of technology" using a portable keyboard, mixing up the iPod, YouTube, music downloads, and more. Funny.

Game designer Will Wright created "Sim City" and "The Sims" -- probably the best-selling computer game of all time (Chris Anderson says in introducing him that "The Sims" has probably occupied 7 billion hours of cumulated world's attention). He comes on stage with a broken arm in a cast, and talks about his new project, "Spore", a game that simulates the complete history and future of an alternative universe populated by fantastic creatures (like the one in the picture at left). He explains it as a multigenerational game, where at every level players can "create" part of the game following the evolution of the creatures, and heavily inflect the dynamics of the overall environment. So the process of playing the game is the process of building up a big database of user-generated content.  "It will be an amplifier for the user's creativity", he says. The demo he shows is that of a game with depth and almost infinite possibilities indeed. "I would like to give people some better calibration in long-term thinking. Maybe giving kids toys like this that let them observe long-term dynamics over a short period is a way in which games can change the world". Possible release date for "Spore": next September.