TEDxLong Beach@Bondi Beach, part 1
Mar. 4th, 2011 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erratioSession 5: Worlds Imagined
Julie Taymor (best known as director of the Broadway version of The Lion King)
* started off by talking about a trip she took to some tribal village, where she accidentally witnessed a group of old men dressed up in elaborate costumes and doing a complex dance even though there was no audience. She concluded that they had been dancing for God, "take that as you will"
* she sees part of her job as a director as distilling a whole story down to a single symbol, that contains the essence of the whole message you're trying to convey. In The Lion King, that symbol is the circle. In The Tempest. that symbol is the sandcastle.
* there were lots of clips of her upcoming productions, a movie version of The Tempest with Helen Mirren as Prospero, and a Broadway version of Spiderman. The Tempest looked pretty cool.
* her work involves a kind of understanding between the actors and the audience, such that an audience can see a woman walk past with a platter of grass on her head and know immediately that she represents the savannah, or they can see a bunch of sticks stuck together with a piece of silk over the top and as it's raised by strings recognise it as the sun. And the emotion or experience you get from seeing that fake sun rising isn't anything like experiencing a real sunrise, but is a product of the medium itself - something created between the director and the audience that makes it something more than a bunch of sticks and silk.
* at the end she returned to her story about the tribal village - afterwards she and a friend went up to a plateau where they could see two volcanos, and one of them started erupting. And she had no choice but to go forward. Everyone is going through their crucible.
* Overall: Good (but not great) speaker, slightly interesting talk, very interesting movie and production clips if you enjoy watching that sort of thing, otherwise I would recommend giving it a miss.
Morgan Spurlock (best known for the movie Supersize Me)
* Before he wrote his talk, he came up with the idea of selling the branding for his talk, with the caveat that he wouldn't necessarily endorse the product and they might end up looking really foolish. So he had an auction on ebay and a few other places.
* He's been in situations that are both difficult and dangerous, but nothing as difficult as facing corporate advertising execs.
* He wanted to make a film called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, with the premise being that a) absolutely everything that could be branded and advertised through product placement, would be, and b) that the process of this whole advertising thing would be shown in the movie too.
* Almost all the big companies he approached refused, because they wouldn't have sufficient control over how their product would be presented.
* So instead he had to start approaching smaller companies individually and trying to get them on board.
* He went to a branding company and asked them to help him work out his personal brand. The process involved taking in some photos of things important to him in some way and talking about how he felt, and then answering a billion questions about himself. Eventually he got told that he had a mindful-playful brand, and that most companies only really do one or the other but not both. Interesting, one of the companies that the branding place listed as displaying the mindful-playful brand was one of the ones that agreed to fund his movie.
* Overall: Very entertaining speaker, well worth listening to even though the talk is essentially just an extended pitch for his movie. Oh and the sponsor for his TED talk was EMC, whose tagline is "embrace transparency". Smart move on their part!
Bill Ford (CEO of Ford)
* Claims both Henry Ford and the original Firestone guy as ancestors, so automobiles are literally in his blood (his wording, not mine)
* Wanted to be a test driver when he was a child, and so would sneak out and drive the cars his dad brought home while his parents were out at dinner. This ended when he nearly crashed into the front room of their house one snowy evening.
* Was also passionately interested in environmental sustainability when younger, and didn't realise that this might conflict with working at Ford.
* When he did join Ford (after some soul-searching), he was told by some senior execs there not to associate with any known or suspected environmentalists
* If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted before he made the model T, they would have said faster horses. This is symptomatic of people in general. While Ford and other companies are working on greener cars, a green traffic jam is still a traffic jam - there are just too many damn cars. In some place in China there was a traffic jam that lasted for 11 days. Events like that are only going to get more common as the world population increases and more and more people have cars. This threatens the freedom of movement that Henry Ford gave people by making affordable cars in the first place. We need a more radical solution.
* There are a bunch of possible solutions to the 'too many cars' problem. In Singapore (Hong Kong?) they have the Octopus system that includes public transport, parking, and pretty much anything travel related. Somewhere else (Saudi Arabia I think) they have these cute little automated cars that you rent or something, and that communicate with each other about traffic and stuff. Some countries also have car-sharing services in place.
* But the solution that he seems to be excited about is for all the cars to have software so they can talk to each other. When you leave home and enter your destination into the cars software, the car will reserve a parking spot for you so that you don't waste time and petrol trying to find a spot (incidentally, apparently trying to find parking is one of the biggest uses of petrol). If there's lots of traffic on the main highway, your car will communicate with the other cars on the road to find you the optimal route to get you to your destination and the other cars to their destinations. (I'm not sure how this solves the 'too many cars' problem though, other than in the short term)
*Overall: Very thoughtful talk about the need for less cars from a guy whose job is to sell more cars.
Terrence McArdie and Ben Newhouse (two programmer dudes)
These guys spent the whole time doing a tech demo of their new program, called Bubbli. The basic premise of a Bubble is that it's a 3D photo - turn the iPad that the picture is on and the image will rotate too to show the surrounding area. I think it also captures sound, judging by one of their passing comments about a Bubble taken from a Thanksgiving dinner, and they made a point of showing that in an ebook that uses their tech, you would be able to go inside an illustration to experience the fictional world (using an example with
extremely crappy textures on their images that kind of killed any cool factor it might have had) Overall, it was obvious that these guys are developers - their presentation skills weren't anywhere near the level of the other speakers. My impression of their tech was "ok it's kind of cool, but so what?" - it's not particularly world-changing and there aren't obvious awesome applications.
Indra Nooyi (CEO of PepsiCo)
* Not many CEO's talk at TED. CEO's aren't trusted much either, according to some scale.
* To research for giving her talk, she started watching TED talks and got hooked on them. TED talks have now transformed the Nooyi household: instead of watching TV together, they watch TED talks together. When her daughter wanted to redecorate her room, Indra asked her to give her a TED talk about it - essentially to sell her on the idea of the redecoration.
* When she became CEO, she wanted to pursue a philosophy of "Performance with purpose" - essentially trying to be responsible for their people, for the environment, trying to get the public more involved, etc etc.
* One of the initiatives produced through this philosophy is their Refresh project, where each month they accept 1000 short videos outlining people's ideas for projects to improve the world, and then let the public vote on them. The winners are given grant money to make their idea happen.
* One of the issues with these ideas is that they're often not really sustainable, eg. one of the projects was two student cheerleaders putting together a disabled cheerleading squad, but the squad is likely to fall apart when those students graduate. Indra is soliciting ideas about how to deal with this, but her current idea is to have a Refresh University, where the people given grant money are taught how to make their project self-sustaining, by building community support and so forth.
* Overall: Felt a bit too much like marketing hype, and I'd like to see actual good ideas get funding rather than feelgood ideas that are all about the warm fuzzies, but having said all that it's still nice to see CEO's of big companies making an effort. Decent speaker but not much content that I didn't cover in the summary.
Julie Taymor (best known as director of the Broadway version of The Lion King)
* started off by talking about a trip she took to some tribal village, where she accidentally witnessed a group of old men dressed up in elaborate costumes and doing a complex dance even though there was no audience. She concluded that they had been dancing for God, "take that as you will"
* she sees part of her job as a director as distilling a whole story down to a single symbol, that contains the essence of the whole message you're trying to convey. In The Lion King, that symbol is the circle. In The Tempest. that symbol is the sandcastle.
* there were lots of clips of her upcoming productions, a movie version of The Tempest with Helen Mirren as Prospero, and a Broadway version of Spiderman. The Tempest looked pretty cool.
* her work involves a kind of understanding between the actors and the audience, such that an audience can see a woman walk past with a platter of grass on her head and know immediately that she represents the savannah, or they can see a bunch of sticks stuck together with a piece of silk over the top and as it's raised by strings recognise it as the sun. And the emotion or experience you get from seeing that fake sun rising isn't anything like experiencing a real sunrise, but is a product of the medium itself - something created between the director and the audience that makes it something more than a bunch of sticks and silk.
* at the end she returned to her story about the tribal village - afterwards she and a friend went up to a plateau where they could see two volcanos, and one of them started erupting. And she had no choice but to go forward. Everyone is going through their crucible.
* Overall: Good (but not great) speaker, slightly interesting talk, very interesting movie and production clips if you enjoy watching that sort of thing, otherwise I would recommend giving it a miss.
Morgan Spurlock (best known for the movie Supersize Me)
* Before he wrote his talk, he came up with the idea of selling the branding for his talk, with the caveat that he wouldn't necessarily endorse the product and they might end up looking really foolish. So he had an auction on ebay and a few other places.
* He's been in situations that are both difficult and dangerous, but nothing as difficult as facing corporate advertising execs.
* He wanted to make a film called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, with the premise being that a) absolutely everything that could be branded and advertised through product placement, would be, and b) that the process of this whole advertising thing would be shown in the movie too.
* Almost all the big companies he approached refused, because they wouldn't have sufficient control over how their product would be presented.
* So instead he had to start approaching smaller companies individually and trying to get them on board.
* He went to a branding company and asked them to help him work out his personal brand. The process involved taking in some photos of things important to him in some way and talking about how he felt, and then answering a billion questions about himself. Eventually he got told that he had a mindful-playful brand, and that most companies only really do one or the other but not both. Interesting, one of the companies that the branding place listed as displaying the mindful-playful brand was one of the ones that agreed to fund his movie.
* Overall: Very entertaining speaker, well worth listening to even though the talk is essentially just an extended pitch for his movie. Oh and the sponsor for his TED talk was EMC, whose tagline is "embrace transparency". Smart move on their part!
Bill Ford (CEO of Ford)
* Claims both Henry Ford and the original Firestone guy as ancestors, so automobiles are literally in his blood (his wording, not mine)
* Wanted to be a test driver when he was a child, and so would sneak out and drive the cars his dad brought home while his parents were out at dinner. This ended when he nearly crashed into the front room of their house one snowy evening.
* Was also passionately interested in environmental sustainability when younger, and didn't realise that this might conflict with working at Ford.
* When he did join Ford (after some soul-searching), he was told by some senior execs there not to associate with any known or suspected environmentalists
* If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted before he made the model T, they would have said faster horses. This is symptomatic of people in general. While Ford and other companies are working on greener cars, a green traffic jam is still a traffic jam - there are just too many damn cars. In some place in China there was a traffic jam that lasted for 11 days. Events like that are only going to get more common as the world population increases and more and more people have cars. This threatens the freedom of movement that Henry Ford gave people by making affordable cars in the first place. We need a more radical solution.
* There are a bunch of possible solutions to the 'too many cars' problem. In Singapore (Hong Kong?) they have the Octopus system that includes public transport, parking, and pretty much anything travel related. Somewhere else (Saudi Arabia I think) they have these cute little automated cars that you rent or something, and that communicate with each other about traffic and stuff. Some countries also have car-sharing services in place.
* But the solution that he seems to be excited about is for all the cars to have software so they can talk to each other. When you leave home and enter your destination into the cars software, the car will reserve a parking spot for you so that you don't waste time and petrol trying to find a spot (incidentally, apparently trying to find parking is one of the biggest uses of petrol). If there's lots of traffic on the main highway, your car will communicate with the other cars on the road to find you the optimal route to get you to your destination and the other cars to their destinations. (I'm not sure how this solves the 'too many cars' problem though, other than in the short term)
*Overall: Very thoughtful talk about the need for less cars from a guy whose job is to sell more cars.
Terrence McArdie and Ben Newhouse (two programmer dudes)
These guys spent the whole time doing a tech demo of their new program, called Bubbli. The basic premise of a Bubble is that it's a 3D photo - turn the iPad that the picture is on and the image will rotate too to show the surrounding area. I think it also captures sound, judging by one of their passing comments about a Bubble taken from a Thanksgiving dinner, and they made a point of showing that in an ebook that uses their tech, you would be able to go inside an illustration to experience the fictional world (using an example with
extremely crappy textures on their images that kind of killed any cool factor it might have had) Overall, it was obvious that these guys are developers - their presentation skills weren't anywhere near the level of the other speakers. My impression of their tech was "ok it's kind of cool, but so what?" - it's not particularly world-changing and there aren't obvious awesome applications.
Indra Nooyi (CEO of PepsiCo)
* Not many CEO's talk at TED. CEO's aren't trusted much either, according to some scale.
* To research for giving her talk, she started watching TED talks and got hooked on them. TED talks have now transformed the Nooyi household: instead of watching TV together, they watch TED talks together. When her daughter wanted to redecorate her room, Indra asked her to give her a TED talk about it - essentially to sell her on the idea of the redecoration.
* When she became CEO, she wanted to pursue a philosophy of "Performance with purpose" - essentially trying to be responsible for their people, for the environment, trying to get the public more involved, etc etc.
* One of the initiatives produced through this philosophy is their Refresh project, where each month they accept 1000 short videos outlining people's ideas for projects to improve the world, and then let the public vote on them. The winners are given grant money to make their idea happen.
* One of the issues with these ideas is that they're often not really sustainable, eg. one of the projects was two student cheerleaders putting together a disabled cheerleading squad, but the squad is likely to fall apart when those students graduate. Indra is soliciting ideas about how to deal with this, but her current idea is to have a Refresh University, where the people given grant money are taught how to make their project self-sustaining, by building community support and so forth.
* Overall: Felt a bit too much like marketing hype, and I'd like to see actual good ideas get funding rather than feelgood ideas that are all about the warm fuzzies, but having said all that it's still nice to see CEO's of big companies making an effort. Decent speaker but not much content that I didn't cover in the summary.
