Mathematics, finance and foresight guru, and Pop!Tech 2005 speaker Nassim Nicholas Taleb is interviewed in this month’s Wired Magazine by James Surowiecki on the limits, biases and flaws in humanity’s ability to see the future. Nicholas’ latest book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (a follow-up to his also terrific 2005 cult [...]

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The welcome letter to this year’s Pop!Tech conference contained a kick-ass quote from Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert, which we felt framed the question of Dangerous Ideas perfectly:
The most dangerous idea is… the idea that ideas can be dangerous.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have [...]

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photo of Neema Mgana by Alize Van Reeth

Every year, Pop!Tech identifies a talented group of highschool and college students who receive full scholarships to attend the conference. This year, we partnered with the National Geographic Society to do something very special with this program: after a nationally competitive search, we selected a group of talented [...]

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One of the many highlights of Pop!Tech 2006 was a special appearance by the Ninja of AskANinja.com:
Pop!Tech’s cool-quotient with 13-to-15 year old boys just skyrocketed.

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Image courtesy of Core77.

You may have noticed that this blog has been silent for a few days - that’s because we were too busy putting on Pop!Tech 2006 to blog Pop!Tech 2006.
Fortunately, and in particular due to our first ever live stream of the event, the blogosphere took care of that for us, better than [...]

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Every October, five hundred of the world’s most provocative thinkers gather at Pop!Tech (www.poptech.org) for three days of visionary conversations about science, technology and the future of ideas. It’s a conference experience like no other - but one that has been limited to the relative few who get to participate in-person.
This year, on our [...]

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The Dutch artist, roboticist and engineering polymath Theo Jansen wow’d Pop!Tech 2005 (and PBS audiences who saw Alive from PopTech) with his incredible, evolving robotic creatures that walk on the wind. And now, his work has been featured in a terrific new BMW commercial that captures the essence of his work and spirit:
Congratulations, Theo! (And [...]

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Last year, University of Indiana economist Ed Castronova (Ted to his friends) opened the eyes of many Pop!Tech participants with his guided tour of the collapsing distinction between virtual and real-world economics. Ed showed how ‘real money trade’ — the exchange of virtual items in videogames for real dollars on eBay — is blossoming, and [...]

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Software developer and Pop!Tech team member Greg Elin has put together a fantastic online widget for the Sunlight Foundation, a new DC-based foundation dedicated to bringing transparency to our all-too-opaque democracy.
The widget creates a context-based popup window on a blog whenever a US Congress Members’ name appears and is clicked. The popup contains links to [...]

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We’re happy to annouce the next book in the PopTech Book Club, The Long Tail by Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief (and upcoming Pop!Tech 2006 speaker) Chris Anderson. (Registrants for the 2006 conference have just received a pre-publication advanced copy.)
At Pop!Tech 2004, noted Internet Analyst Clay Shirky noted that blogs follow a power-law distribution of interlinkage [...]

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