There is so much content out there on the internet now, however, less than 1/3 of the material is available in any given language. So we partnered with an amazing company called dotSUB, to translate the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts in eight highly-relevant languages in the hopes of removing language as a barrier to globalization. The eight target languages (Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Swahili, Farsi, Arabic, French and Spanish) were picked because they represent vital areas of the developing world.

We’ve released a preliminary batch of subtitled Pop!Casts including:

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and best-selling author; Bunker Roy, one of India’s most successful social entrepreneurs; Jesse Sullivan and Dr. Todd Kuiken, the world’s first bionic man and the doctor who helped him become so; Carolyn Porco, who leads the imaging team on the Cassini missions to Saturn; Zinhle Thabete, a front-line warrior in the battle against HIV in South Africa; and Richard Alley, the renowned paleoclimatologist and climate change expert.

Don’t worry — more is on the way!

dotSUB was founded by Michael Smolens, who has a lifetime of experience doing business in high risk emerging economies. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders went to work creating a web-based tool that enables video to be accessed in an open, collaborative, ‘wiki’ type environment. This tool gives both professional and amateur viewers the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the video file. The same tool facilitates captioning video for the hearing-impaired. You should definitely check out dotsub.com to see the amazing array of videos that they have subtitled into more than 48 languages.

BusinessWeek has also written up an article about the Pop!Tech/dotSub Inititative which can be seen online.

To see the Pop!Casts, please visit www.poptech.org.

The World Wildlife Federation recently launched an awesome billboard campaign in Canada concerning changing ocean levels.

Using “celestial mechanics” similar to the way a sundial works, a scalloped awning over the billboard casts a shadow, creating a rising water effect over the course of the day.

Here’s an explanation:
“The board respects celestial mechanics (Kepler Rocks!). It’s perpendicular to the equator, with an unobstructed exposure to the west. The “waves” start at about 12:00. The challenge was not azimuth (the daily path of the sun), but altitude, which due to the Earth’s tilt, required the scalloped awning’s shape to be distorted to compensate for 43N latitude, during the life of the posting (about 8 weeks). Thanks to CBS Outdoor, and PLEASE support the WWF.” - YouTube user LowerC02

The video below really captures the elegance and cleverness of the advertisement.

via: TrendHunter

another very clever YouTube-inspired ad to promote blood donation: http://www.blographic.com/divers/thank-you

24 Hours, 7 Continents, 9 Cities, 2 Billion People: the Live Earth Concerts for a Climate in Crisis are coming your way this July 7, 2007.

Part of a global campaign to promote awareness of the current state of climate change, the concerts feature more than 100 music artists from The Police to Snoop Dogg to Metallica to Smashing Pumpkins (for the full and quite impressive list click here). Watch with the world at www.LiveEarth.MSN.com.

And be sure to check out Live Earth’s official guidebook: The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change, written by long-time Pop!Tech participant David de Rothschild, founder of Adventure Ecology.

The entire book, from conceptions took 7 months, with the project finding its legs at Pop!Tech 2006. David met publisher Charlie Melcher in the “dungeon” of the Camden Opera House (aka Pop!Tech’s Screening Room). He had just been commissioned to do this book, turn-around time was super short, and Charlie offered to help. They went straight at it in February and were finished by April.

Which tip in the survival guide does David take most to heart? “Number 32: Get lost in nature. .when was the last time you took your shoes off and walked about in nature? It’s important to get yourself outside and re-engaged. In the epic scale of Live Earth, it’s worthwhile to ‘get lost in nature’ in order to remember why we need some new guidelines for living in a changing world.”

For a peek at some of survival tips from the book and a look at the great illustrations, you can visit the Live Earth site at http://www.liveearth.org/crisis_solutions.php.

This month Business 2.0 published their list of “The 50 Who Matter Now”. The list includes up-and-coming entrepreneurs, some usual suspects like the guys from Digg, Facebook, Second Life, and of course the media’s latest darling…You. Me? Yes, You!

Have You had your fifteen minutes of fame? According to Business 2.0, you have. The publication is waving its finger at us and our YouTube loving ways. It was only last year that, according to Business 2.0 and Time Magazine, we were No. 1. We are now swimming in the bottom five. How the mighty have fallen.

This is what the magazine had to say:

“You: Web-enabled mass participation

Rank: 45

Why you matter: Can we be blunt? You had a disappointing year. It began with great promise, when this magazine placed You in the No.1 slot on the 2006 edition of this list. “You’ve become an integral part of the action as a member of the aggregated, interactive, self-organizing, auto-entertaining audience,” we said, and we really meant it! A few months later, our corporate cousins at Time concurred and named You the 2006 Person of the Year.

Then You got lazy. All those YouTube videos of cats dancing, playing the piano, and drunkenly running into walls? So derivative. Then there was all the fawning over Snakes on a Plane. What was up with that? And don’t even get us started on Sanjaya. Look, we still think You have lots of potential. But if You’re really going to change the media landscape, it’s time to step up Your game.”

Do you think You/We are changing the media landscape for the better or are we democratizing content to the point of buffoonery?

Last weekend, new media artist and Pop!Tech 2006 speaker Hasan Elahi was interviewed on NPR’s Studio 360 hosted by Kurt Andersen about Hasan’s website art project, Tracking Transcience.

The website has tracked Hasan’s life in all its mundane glory, in real time, for more than 5 years now. He began the project in response to his experience in an airport where he was wrongly identified and detained as a terrorist and was constrained to report on all of his whereabouts and movements on the days around 9/11 to the FBI. After he was freed of all charges, he decided to voluntarily track his movements online.

Pop!Tech Host and Curator, Andrew Zolli is also on the program to discuss the impact of Hasan’s work and its context in a world with a changing view of privacy.

Listen to it here on iTunes, or visit the Studio 360 website and listen to the episode online.

AND stay tuned for Hasan’s upcoming Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his 2006 presentation. Check Pop!Tech Pop!Casts for more information.

Mark your calendar and set your Tivo to watch Chef Homaro Cantu on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, at 3:00 p.m. CST this coming Tuesday, April 10. This will be an incredible pairing of one of the world’s most creative chefs and one of Hollywood’s most creative comic personalities.

For more information and air times, visit Ellen’s website: http://ellen.warnerbros.com/

(and that’s a picture of Chef Cantu when cooking with Class V Lasers were but a sparkle in his eye. It was too tempting to post that picture from his website - it had to be done.)

I flew up to Camden, ME this week to meet up with my fellow Pop!Techers. As I waited for my flight at New York’s JFK, I decided to ease myself into an outdoorsy frame of mind and bought the latest issue of Outside Magazine.

The banner across cover model, Governor Schwarzenegger’s chest, reads The Green Issue. In the magazine, they list some of the Green leaders and innovators from politics, health care, architecture and Hollywood.

Entrepreneur, explorer, eligible bachelor and Pop!Tech friend David de Rothschild is featured as one of these Enviro All-Stars. David is the founder of Adventure Ecology, a program that gets kids excited about adventure and fosters an appreciation for global responsibility.

“The environment is an area that requires a great deal of energy and optimism,” David says, “and, to my mind, kids have these features in abundance.”

Here is another feature from 2006 on David and how he started Adventure Ecology (also from Outside Magazine).

Between every Pop!Tech session we show some of the coolest video interstitials as a mental sorbet of sorts. We look for music videos, advertisements or video art pieces that have caught our eye for their stunning visuals, social commentary or just plain hilarity.

One group that we consistently turn to for video fodder, and often meet all the above criteria, is the Paris collective, Pleix. They are relatively well known now, (Their piece, Birds, circulated like made around the web) but the individuals behind Pleix remains a mystery to many.

At the recent ENSAD conference in Paris, Eric Augier, one of the artists of Pleix, took the spotlight to share their personal and commercial work. An overview of some of their works is given here.

Here is a description of the Netlag project which we showed at the 2006 Pop!Tech.

In 2004, they created another project especially for the Ferme du Buisson: Netlag. The first step was to develop a custom-built software that grabs on the internet movies from surveillance webcams all around the world (up to 3000 webcams because of the limitations of the program). One frame every 10 minutes was then recorded during a 24-hour span in January 2004. The films were then mapped on a representation of the world, the images were accelerated to give a better feeling of their night/day evolution and the result is pretty impressive: the African continent is nearly invisible while certain European countries and the US appear to be very active because, as we know it, surveillance is pretty well developed there.

What makes the work even more fascinating is that it was conceived before the launch of Google Earth.

The idea attracted the interest of the commercial world. Adidas bought the right to reproduce the concept for a year. They used the money to finance other “personal” projects.

via:: We Make Money Not Art

During his presentation at Pop!Tech 2006 on Emergent Arts, Will Wright (Creator of The Sims) discussed his feeling that complexity is achieved by the accumulation of very simple, basic elements. That is the premise behind his much anticipated game (about 3 years worth of anticipation) Spore.

Popular Science has an in-depth interview with Wright where the gaming innovator discusses Spore , Wii, Second Life, the value of failure and getting back to the metaphorical “sandbox”.

On Spore as an educational tool, Wright says:

“I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity–creativity is a fundamental of education that’s not really taught so much. But giving people tools…what it means to be human is to learn to use tools to basically expand your abilities. And I think computer games are in some sense a fundamental tool for our imagination.”

There is also a quote that stood out in the article that resonated with the Pop!Tech ethos. Wright discusses his plans for a more “relevant” gaming experience in his next endeavors–games that play on cultural parameters such as:

“politics and economics and environmentalism, all these things as these horrendously complicated things with a million variables. But yet there is a limited level of understanding of the climate, of politics, of economics, that we could take anybody and make them five points smarter in any one of these dimensions. And just making everybody in the world five points more educated on each of these dimensions I think would have a tremendous impact on the system as a whole.”

If you missed the sneak peak of the game presented at Pop!Tech, you can see more images here at the Spore Image Gallery.

The game is slated to be released in the Spring of 2007…(fingers crossed).

AND

Don’t miss the Popular Science Podcast with Pop!Tech’s Official Balladeer Jonathan Coulton and Spore designer Chaim Gingold here.

This morning, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the new time on the Doomsday Clock. It is now 5 minutes to Midnight.

The proximity to Midnight shows the increasing threat of a second Nuclear Age and the effects of Climate Change.

For the offical statement from The Bulletin, click here.
You can also listen to audio from the Press Conference here.