Last week was, as usual, a busy week in New York for the tech, media, and startup community. Burda’s DLD conference was in town, as was TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY. And it was the Huffington Post’s 10th anniversary (celebrated by Arianna and many of her editors at DLD). And, totally unrelated to anything Techonomy, let’s not forget the Met Gala.
On that DLD session celebrating HuffPo, the editor of HuffPo Canada gave a shout-out to someone they’ve recently covered—Thiel Fellow, Techonomist, inventor, and entrepreneur Eden Full (who is still only 23 years old). If you haven’t heard of her, check out this short video from Techonomy 2012. Her simple, low cost, solar-panel tracking invention, the SunSaluter, tracks the moving sun and can produce energy and water. Here’s her April interview with the HuffPo.
At DLD we also caught up with another impressive Techonomist, ResearchGate CEO Ijad Madisch. ResearchGate is a Berlin-based startup that has built an amazing social network that allows scientists and researchers globally to, connect and collaborate, radically speeding up the process of scientific discovery. It’s most notable funders are also all former speakers at Techonomy: Matt Cohler of Benchmark, Peter Thiel, and Bill Gates, who personally led the most recent $35-million funding round for ResearchGate. DLD opened with Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick interviewing Madisch. There’s lots more in the transcript from Ijad’s TE14 session The New Geology of Intelligence.
My favourite DLD session was a presentation by Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on corruption in the political process and the conversation that followed with open-government activist, author, and entrepreneur Anke Domscheit-Berg on how we can work towards better democracy. It’s easy to get frustrated about the state of politics more or less everywhere but it’s good to know that there are smart people not just in tech but in government and in public interest thinking about this and working on it every day. At next month’s Techonomy Policy, one related session is “Start-Up Designs for Future Government,” which will explore how entrepreneurs are now creating not just companies but entire systems that could potentially remake government and governance …
