TED 2009 Highlights: Day 1

A cultural dialogue on sex, Bill Gates releases more bugs into the world, and lots of caffeine.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first — live-blogging TED turned out to be much harder than we thought, especially fighting the 10-hour time difference and Red-Bulling our way to the dog hours of the morning. But it was tremendously exciting.

You can check the speaker schedule for the line-up, but be sure to catch on our real-time updates, as there were a number of surprise appearances, including two of our greatest heroes: Al Gore, who gave us an even more chilling update on global warming, and Yves Behar, who unveiled his latest project — the fully electric Mission One motorcycle, a beautifully designed 150-mph wonder.

But perhaps the most noteworthy of the day’s wildcards was a short cameo by professional jaw-dropper Cindy Gallop, who unveiled her new site, MakeLoveNotPorn.com — a humorously framed yet enormously culturally ambitious project that takes the myths of pornography and balances them with the reality of sex.

Gallop talked about the failure of cultural institutions to address the issue of sex adequately, especially to teenagers.

So it’s not surprising that hard pornography has, in effect, become sexual education.

The site even invites visitors to submit their own porn myth busts, which Gallop hopes would create an open dialogue about the cultural meaning of sex. And this — the ability to create an open forum for a cultural taboo — is just one of the billion reasons we love TED.

Another delight — despite our initial skepticism — was Bill Gates, who not only managed to release a box of very real mosquitoes into the audience while talking about malaria mortality, but also cracked a rather hilarious impromptu joke during the Q&A at the end: Chris asked him what he’d like written on his tombstone when he dies “in 10 or 15 years,” to which Gates responded with something to the effect of:

10 or 15? I certainly hope I live longer than that. So, in that case, it’ll say “Check my pulse!”

A geek god, an iconic philanthropist, and now a standup comic? Who new. Even we in the vicious Mac camp have to give it to the guy.

Finally, two simply titled yet truly promising Earth-centric documentaries were revealed. Home, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, explores life on Earth from a bird’s eye perspective, showcasing phenomenal aerial landscapes that are disappearing before our eyes.

Oceans, produced by the amazing Jake Eberts in collaboration with Jacques Perrin, was edited down from over 300 hours of footage from a worldwide deep-ocean expedition costing $75 million. From the phenomenal cinematography to the pure stride-stopping brilliance of the Blue Planet that it captures, Oceans is an absolute must-see.

And while both films are a gloomy reminder that we’re going faster than the planet can sustain, they also do something much more valuable: Give us hope there is still time to avoid disaster.

We’ll be live-blogging today as well, so be sure to follow us on Twitter if you’re into, you know, hearing stuff before everyone else does.

The Story of Stuff

How much a $4.99 radio actually costs and what 7 football fields are doing in the Amazon jungle.

If you think you “get” the concept of sustainability, are you willing to bet your favorite gadget on it? Let’s start with an easier question: Do you know where that gadget came from and how?

Instigator Annie Leonard spent 10 years traveling the world, tracking where our stuff comes from and where it ends up — essentially dissecting our “materials economy” to reveal the very real crisis it’s in. She then partnered with a couple of sustainability advocacy groups to produce The Story of Stuff — a part-educational, part-revelational, part-mobilizing 20-minute film that sucks you in, preconceived notions of sustainability and all, and hurls you into the nitty-gritty of it, all through delightful animation and a refreshingly fast pace.

The film reveals the fundamental brokenness of our consumption model — we’re using a linear production-consumption-disposal system, but running a linear system on a finite planet is, well, ludicrous.

Without stealing too much of the film’s thunder, we’ll just say that it busts a number of sustainability myths that even the most eco-conscious of us hold, pushing us to delve far deeper into the issue than the superficial nature of the “green” fad. (Hint: Recycling doesn’t help nearly as much as you’d like to think, so stop buying those I Heart Recycling shirts.)

The Story of Stuff explores issues of government and corporations as they relate to sustainability, probes political, cultural and commercial principles of consumerism, and really makes us question how it’s possible for RadioShack to sell a radio for the laughable price of $4.99, which doesn’t even pay for shelf space.

For us, the pinnacle of how deformed our culture is came from a quote of the famous post-war economist Victor Lebow’s frightening advice to the Eisenhower administration:

It’s not surprising, then, that we live in a world economy where those who don’t own or buy a lot of stuff simply don’t have value. Which explains why the Third World is being exploited, why natural resources are being pillaged from those who have inhabited them for generations, why that capitalist sense of entitlement is really humanity’s greatest downfall.

The film ends on a hopeful note, suggesting a more realistic solution in a new system based on sustainability and equity, where millions of us intervene with small contributions all along the system, so that our cumulative impact makes a real, tangible, literally world-changing difference.

And it all starts with seeing the big picture like you’ve never seen it before.

So go ahead, see. The Story of Stuff is easily the best thing you’ll do for your global citizen conscience this year.

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Catch of the Day

Preservation the surfer way, or why farmers’ markets are now selling condoms.

We’re suckers for clever guerrilla campaigns. We’re also suckers for sustainability. So, naturally, we’re all over this campaign for environmental nonprofit Surfrider Foundation.

From condom “fillets” to styrofoam “bites” packaged like something you’d find at Whole Foods, the Catch of the Day campaign is a visceral reminder of how pollution both stifles wildlife and ultimately ends up on our plates.

The junk is all 100% authentic, hand-picked from various beaches across America, from Galveston to South Padre Island to Venice Beach.

Yep, the condoms too.

The campaign positions littering as the antithesis of the true surfer spirit of bonding with nature, respecting it, and appreciating its raw beauty. Because nothing puts as big a damper on that appreciation as having a cigarette bud stick between your toes while walking on a wild beach.

Best part: Packaged in (we hope post-consumer) plastic to look like seafood, the stuff is offered at real farmers’ markets across the coasts. Talk about authenticity and stride-stopping impact. Genius.

Out of Saatchi & Saatchi, LA.

via TreeHugger (Thanks, Teddy)

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The Year in Ideas: 8 Best of 2008

8 things that shaped the year’s innovation footprint, or what Buckminster Fuller has to do with tap water and Michael Phelps.

This being an indiscriminate ideas blog, we’ve put together a selection of the year’s best ideas — big and small, spanning a multitude of categories, and held together by the sole common tangent of being truly, tangibly, future-changingly innovative. Here’s our shortlist for the 8 most compelling ideas of 2008.

iTUNES GENIUS

Music recommendation services have been around for a while, driven by smart algorithms that seem to know your music taste better than your bff. But despite all the Pandoras and Last.fm’s of the world, the music industry and its business model are falling apart. And digital music leader iTunes may have a win-win solution for both consumers and the industry, thanks to the recently released Genius feature.

So why is Genius genius? It works remarkably well — its recommendations are immaculate and the playlists it builds can rival even the most meticulously compiled mixtape that your 8th-grade sweetheart spent 3 weeks crafting. More importantly, it fights the two deadliest threats to today’s music industry — the failure to monetize “fandom” (Last.fm may be great at helping you discover new favorite artists, but not so great at cashing the fandom check) and consumer’s music library overload. (Anyone with more than a few hundred songs in their iTunes, which is pretty much everyone, is slowly losing track of the tracks and forgetting some of those artists even existed.)

In a world where keeping up with our own music is becoming overwhelming and getting new stuff is anything from burdensome to illegal, Genius steps in as a welcome and well-crafted one-two-punch solution.

LZR RACER

No one made more waves in Summer ’08 than wonderboy Michael Phelps. And when a record-breaking 8 Olympic gold medal streak is almost shadowed by another wave-maker, we know there’s something big going on.

Wave-maker in point: Speedo’s technologically supreme and ethically controversial LZR Racer Suit. It’s been called anything from “technological doping” to downright incapacitating for non-LZR-wearing swimmers.

But here’s the thing: 3 years of R&D produced technology that’s utterly groundbreaking and innovative and all those superlatives attached to true progress. So we find it ridiculous to put a “moral” label on it. It’s like saying that cars should’ve never upgraded to better tires because it would’ve been unfair to all the lagging manufacturers, or Firefox should’ve never revolutionized the web browser because it was unfair to Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Progress has to start somewhere, and the laggards better suck it up and learn to keep up.

YES WE CAN SONG

We’ve featured it again and again. And, yep, we’re doing it yet again. Because will.i.am‘s deeply moving, celebrity-powered remix of Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech managed to do something extraordinary, something never before seen in the stiff world of politics: Tap the very emotional chord that makes people so profoundly moved by and connected to music, and translating it to political motivation.

The resulting Song For Change became the most-watched election-related video on YouTube and we strongly believe it had a lot to do with getting the President Elect that much-needed, make-or-break youth vote.

BUCKYPAPER

It may be a scientific cliche that the best of discoveries happen by accident, but it’s exactly the case with buckypaper — a revolutionary material composed of tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.

What makes buckypaper unique isn’t simply its ability to conduct both electricity and heat, but also the fact it’s 10 times lighter and 500 times stronger than steel.

You could say that buckypaper virtually came from outer space.

In 1985, British scientist Harry Kroto tried to simulate the conditions that exist in a stars, the source of all carbon in the universe, to see how they make the element of life. But halfway through the experiment, something unusual happened: A bizarre 60-atom carbon molecule shaped like a soccer ball popped up out of the blue. Kroto thought it looked like iconic architect, inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, so he named the new molecule buckminsterfullerene, or “buckyballs” for short. (Besides the wacky name, the discovery also landed Kroto and colleagues the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996.)

Fast-forward 20-odd years, and you’ve got a renewed interest in the chemical oddball, resulting in the development of a thin film that forms when the carbon tubes are filtered through a fine mesh and stick together in a liquid suspension — that’s buckypaper.

So we can sit back and wait for that super light, super fast, thunderstorm-proof buckypaper jet plane.

RICOH GREEN BILLBOARD

Consumerism is the reason why we’re in our climate pickle, no question there. It’s wasteful and gratuitous and driven by excess. And the marketing industry is pouring more fuel into its fire than anything else. So it’s refreshing to see bold, innovative efforts that significantly shrink the carbon footprint of capitalism’s necessary evil.

Case in point: Times Square’s first “green” billboard for office equipment supplier Ricoh. At $3 million, the board is powered solely by 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels connected to a bank of batteries. Comapred to a traditional electric billboard, it’s estimated to save 18 tons of carbon over the course of a year — enough to light 6 large houses.

And with over 15,000 billboards in New York City alone, do the math. Ok, we’ll do it for you — roughly 270,000 tons of carbon spewed into the atmosphere each year just by NYC’s outdoor advertising, the equivalent of lighting a small 90-house village.

The board took about a year from inception to completion and entailed a whole lot of challenges. Eventually, they were able to find a small California-based company, PacWind, that makes very efficient turbine technology that actually works in very little wind.

The best part is how “real” company executives are about the new technology and its drawbacks. (Like, say, the fact that the billboard will go out on a cloudy day.)

An advertisement is not a mission-critical function… nobody will ever die because our eco-board is lit or is not. So we think that if it goes dark, it’s actually an even brighter light on the fact that we’re using alternative energy and that we’re not wasting carbon in order to advertise.

You said it, brother.

GOOGLE ANDROID

Granted, Android was unveiled in late 2007. But its fundamental “great ideaness” lies in its category-defying, industry-revolutionizing open model. And it officially became open-source only a couple of months ago, on October 21, 2008.

Today, the entire source code is available under an Apache license, which allows developers and vendors to add free extensions and toss them right back into the open source community. And open-source evangelists’ nitpicking aside, that’s something rare and precious in today’s telecom oligopoly and the stifling proprietariness of everything. (iPhone/AT&T lovenest, we’re looking at you.)

GINA

When BMW’s GINA concept car fist made the buzz rounds mid-year, many thought it was a hoax or a clever teaser for something a bit more… real. It turned out, however, to be a no-B.S., totally serious, perfectly real effort by the trend-setting German automaker.

The GINA Light Visionary Model is, simply put, a car made out of cloth. Instead of having a metal or plastic body, GINA is draped in a flexible material stretched over a movable wire mesh, making the car a structural chameleon — the driver can choose to change its shape on a whim.

Beyond the sheer cool factor, GINA is also considerably more environmentally reasonable than traditional cars. Not only does the light fabric take much less energy to produce than heavier, more rigid materials, but it also makes the total weight of the car much lower, resulting in significantly better fuel efficiency.

Plus, it’s fucking badass.

THE TAP PROJECT

You may recall how seriously we take the drinking water problem around here. Which is why the Tap Project is topping our ideas list this year — a small but incredibly smart, ambitious and inspired project that has the potential to make tremendous difference to the poor by asking ridiculously little of the wealthy.

Here’s how it works: During World Water Week in March this year,the Tap Project launched a nationwide effort, inviting restaurants and their patrons to simply donate $1 (or more) for the tap water they’d normally get for free. Every dollar raised buys a child in the third world 40 days worth of clean drinking water.

Pause to digest that. Exactly.

So simple. So potent. And so eye-opening, juxtaposing what we in the seat of privilege take for granted with the deadly lack thereof that kills — literally — millions.

The Tap Project is the brain child of creative icon David Droga and was developed in partnership with UNICEF. Over 2,350 restaurants participated in the 2008 push, raising more than $5 million — the equivalent of 1.7 million days of clean drinking water for children around the world.

With close to 1 million restaurants nationwide (it’s the second-largest industry outside of government), you can only imagine the project’s full breadth of potential as it continues to reach critical mass.

Now that’s an idea.