people can interact with). Steve helped create the technology behind Microsoft’s well-known Photosynth software.
—Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson will talk about how to create “brave new world” startups—companies that don’t just make something better, faster, or cheaper, but shake up entire industries. He will address some of the practical issues that entrepreneurs and investors face when they try to do something really big.
—David Bluhm of Z2Live will discuss the emerging sector of social mobile gaming, and how to build a community of gamers who really interact—and how this will impact the video games of the future. He might also talk about how understanding social game mechanics could impact education, training, and other societal areas.
—Norm Wu of Qliance will discuss how to provide primary-care medical services to patients without involving health insurance companies. It’s a disruptive idea to the current U.S. healthcare system, and one that seems to allow patients to deal much more directly with their doctors.
—Dan Weld of the UW’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Madrona Venture Group, will talk about advances in semantic Web search. An expert on artificial intelligence and Web interfaces, Dan will discuss the future of online knowledge discovery.
—And last, but definitely not least, we’ll have a keynote chat between Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures (and former Microsoft chief technology officer) and Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology (and founder of numerous biotech companies including the new Integrated Diagnostics). This cross-disciplinary discussion will touch on topics such as how to invent across different fields, how to make breakthrough ideas scalable and marketable, and which technology and business problems most urgently need to be solved by the world’s top brains.
Personally, I’m also hoping to hear more about how an “invention capital industry” could help solve some of these problems, as Myhrvold has argued, and what kinds of breakthrough ideas are most promising for biologists and techies to work on together. And I definitely want to hear all of your questions too. See you on March 29.
