Link: sevenload.com

Carolyn Porco told the story of the 60 moons of Saturn using incredible imagery from the Casini mission. All the moons are made of ice, Hyperion (? not sure of the names) looks like a sponge. She spoke inspiringly about the possibility of life on these moons. This is a photo of the heat plumes coming off of Encephalis.

Paulo Coehlo talked about the effects of an open-source approach to publishing and using the read/write experience on the internet to create relationships between author and audience. After pirating his books in other languages and facilitated downloading – that elevated the actual sales of the book.

Most Inspiring was Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the wall,” in which he attempted to teach sometimes illiterate, non-English speaking, non-computer literate kids by just putting a touch screen computer in a public space in a town. He talked about the power of games to create desire – an addictive desire to learn and understand through their system, the same way that a desirable feedback loop provides compelling incentive to repeat and close the loop in the system. His current project is creating a facility where children have the tools to teach themselves.

The Gadgetoff guys rolled in with their crazy array of projects. Most interesting to me were: Josh Klein’s Crow Project , the Pleo, Sony Egg – weird, Clocky, e-ink reader watch, in-person video conferencing system, ohmibod – teledildonics ipod extender, eyefi, solar battery charger, hd camcorder with sd card and add eyefi to broadcast live, wise led flashlight, audio recorder, portable broadcast tv, talking prescription bottle among others.

Chuck Hoberman’s adaptive buildings and reactive facades are great and remind me of L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris which consists of one wall made up of aperatures which respond to sunlight.

Pablos is the master hacker extrodinaire, here’s he’s grabbing Dan Dubno’s credit card info from within Dan’s wallet.

Facebook has 60 million active users, they went from 10 to 60 million in 1.5 yrs. 37% is in the US, last week translation beta is available. Smart talks about being focused on user determined data sharing. Really protective face of their utility. The dominant argument on the panel was that everyone apart from Facebook, unquestionably the most succesful app on the panel, is using OpenID and they were arguing that FB is closed.

Surprisingly, there was not much discussion of mobile integration – and on my blackberry the FB mobile app leaves a lot to be desired.

Future of the City: Patrik Schumacher, Charles Renfro, Bjarke Ingels, Richard Wurman, Moderator: Kazys Varnelis

Charles Renfro from Diller, Scofidio + Renfro “we try to make things that disappear.” I was excited to see their planting plan for the High Line which they’ll get started with in April.

Bjark Engels talked about transforming the roles of architects in the context of his groups approach to re-brand Danmarc. He focused on creating the projects you want to create instead of waiting for projects to become available through competitions, etc.