Pop!Tech Markets Launches

After having attended the Pop!Tech conference a few times ourselves in the past, we were thrilled with the opportunity to work with the folks at Pop!Tech to launch Pop!Tech Markets.

Pop!Tech is a renowned ideas summit and social innovation network dedicated to accelerating the positive impact of world-changing people and ideas. The organization is known for its visionary Pop!Tech conferences, engaging media productions, and the innovative social change programs that it fosters worldwide.

Nate and I will be attending this year's conference in picturesque Camden, Maine, so if there are any Inkling regulars from our public marketplace or corporate users attending, come find us!

Here's a bit more about this year's conference:

Taking place October 22 – 25 in the seaside village of Camden, Maine, this year's event will chart the core scarcities humans and organizations will encounter this century – and how a wealth of new innovations, bottom-up approaches to collaboration and insights into collective wisdom might hold the keys to addressing the challenges that lie ahead. Now in its 12th year, the Pop!Tech conference is a remarkable gathering of more than 600 thought leaders, influencers and social change agents – from the worlds of science, technology, business, social innovation, the arts, philanthropy and more – that each fall explores the new ideas, technologies and forces of change shaping our future.

Pop!Tech '08 will focus on the rapidly-changing 21st century dynamics of systems based on scarcity and abundance. Many different domains will be explored, from the social web to population growth and energy consumption, from truly sustainable business models to politics and peacemaking. Every topic will be examined through an array of lenses – including the new ethics, economic realities, risks and possibilities in a world defined by dramatic scarcities and abundances. An eclectic group of world-class visionaries will help drive the discussion, including:

Malcolm Gladwell – pop sociologist and journalist. Author of #1 best sellers The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell will preview and discuss the themes in his forthcoming book The Outliers – an examination of what separates extraordinary and average people.

Clay Shirky - Internet analyst. An adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and author of the recent hit book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Shirky will discuss the potential that’s been unlocked by mass adoption of social media.

Gary Slutkin, M.D. – epidemiologist and anti-violence innovator. Dr. Slutkin will share a breakthrough approach he’s developed to help eradicate violence: treating it like an epidemic. Based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Slutkin is founder and Executive Director of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention’s anti-violence program, CeaseFire, which has helped reduce shootings in inner city Chicago neighborhoods by as much as 75%. Previously, at the World Health Organization, he helped Uganda become the first country in Africa to reverse its AIDS epidemic.

Laurie Garrett – global health expert. The only journalist to ever win a Peabody, Polk and Pulitzer (while at Newsday and NPR), Garrett is an acknowledged expert in public health, newly emerging and re-emerging diseases – and their effects on foreign policy and national security. At Pop!Tech she will discuss the current state of global public health and why it’s not working.

Stephen Badylak, D.V.M., Ph.D. and M.D. – regenerative medicine expert. Last year Dr. Badylak shocked the medical world when a remarkable powder he helped develop – culled from pig bladders and containing multiple growth factors that are effective in humans – led two patients to entirely re-grow severed fingertips in just six weeks. At Pop!Tech, Dr. Badylak will detail his work to help Iraqi war veterans re-grow body parts lost in battle.

Suzanne Seggerman – serious games expert. President and co-founder of Games 4 Change, a non-profit advancing the use of video games as tools for social change, Seggerman will survey the burgeoning serious games movement – which uses game technology to address the most serious issues of our day: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, poverty, global warming and the genocide in Darfur.

Bill Bishop – journalist and author. In The Big Sort, Bishop marshals mountains of original data to illustrate how Americans have sorted themselves into homogonous communities nationwide, becoming culturally and politically divided. At Pop!Tech, he will discuss what this polarization means for our economy, culture and democracy moving forward.

Kelly Dobson – roboticist. Dobson is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab developing a method of personal, societal, and psychoanalytical engagement termed “Machine Therapy.” At Pop!Tech she will examine the changing relationship between people and machines and exhibit robots she’s developed with “expressive engaging behaviors, strength of character, negotiative egos and neurotic propensities.”

Matt Mason – former pirate radio dj. Author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, Mason is a noted London pirate radio and club dj who will address the economic value of digital piracy.

Chandler Burr – The New York Times fragrance critic. A global scent expert, Burr’s recent book The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris & New York juxtaposes a year behind the scenes at Hermes – shadowing the creation of legendary perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena’s new scent – with a year inside Coty, with Sarah Jessica Parker, as she directed the making of her perfume "Lovely." At Pop!Tech, Burr will lead an interactive tutorial, with actual perfumes and scent raw materials, on the science, business, technology and global geography of scent.

Jay Parkinson, M.D. – Web 2.0 personal care physician. Dr. Parkinson is a founder of Hello Health, a groundbreaking, 21st century healthcare practice, and Chief Imagineer of Myca, developer of an online platform enabling doctors to see and receive client updates and communicate via email, IM, video and SMS. At Pop!Tech he will share how he’s helping doctors become entrepreneurs – utilizing today’s most powerful communications tools – to the benefit of both patients and healthcare providers.