19th May 2008

I’m thinking digital this week…

posted in Conferences, Social Media, Web 2.0 |
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Thanks to my pal, Steve Clayton I’m off to Newcastle this week to attend the Thinking Digital conference. This is my first conference of the year and I’m really looking forward to it. 

The event takes on an eclectic range of technology-based topics that have (or soon will have) a profound effect upon the way we work and live: from the future of media and making far better use of technology, to our obsession with happiness and creating a cure for ageing.

The speaker line up is fantastic, highlight guest speakers include:

  • Greg Dyke , former Director General of the BBC.                                                                                                
  • Doug Richard , formerly of The Dragons’ Den on BBC2 and founder of Library House.  Doug is also the Chairman and CEO of Trutap, a great new startup in London. 
  • Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist & author of The Singularity is Near
  • The Fake Steve Jobs aka Dan Lyons, senior editor of Forbes Magazine & author of Options.
  • Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s Software + Services Lead and self confessed “Geek in Disguise.  I’m looking forward to seeing the first live public demos of Microsoft’s Live Mesh.
  • Tara Hunt, founder of Citizen Agency, San Francisco.

If you are attending the conference, ping me an mail and let’s meet up?   jas {at] thewebpitch {dot} {com}

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  • Elvira
    I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.

    Recently read another incredible book that I can't recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil's work. The book is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor's talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It's spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I'm not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I've read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they're making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
    If you haven't heard Dr Taylor's TEDTalk, that's an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it's 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).

    There's a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best ""Fantastic Voyage"" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
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