The 3L Mantra to live by!

Performance by Muthoni, the drummer queen Starving artists, rich recording labels…that’s how the cliché goes. Microfinance, usually reserved for talk on farmer loans and such is now making waves into the world of the music industry. Fans are putting their money where their mouth is, enabling start-up capital to aspiring musicians from developing countries around the world. The clincher here is that musicians do not give up ownership or control of their music rights. microfinance + music + digital media = Muthoni the drummer queen! for more, check out TEDx Amsterdam site: Moving to the microfinance beat!

Sarah Darwin talks about Darwin's journey replayed today Like the usual family pressure is not enough, having Charles Darwin as your great great grandfather must hardly be an easy feat. That said, rather than hide from it, Sarah Darwin embraces it openly and audaciously retraces the “emotional” journe, as she calls it, of the HMS Beagle. A biologist herself, Sarah describes how she and her family set sail round the world on the Dutch clipper Stad-Amsterdam, starting at the same port where Charles Darwin embarked around 178 years ago... Check out the TEDx website for more: Sarah Darwin: Following in your footsteps great great granddaddy! AND Peter van Lindonk's talk on demanding creativity as ground for unity for stimulating ideas It’s about time someone added chutzpah into conferences! Aren’t most conferences about remembering the lines but forgetting the theatre of it all? Peter van Lindonk, the co-founder of the annual PINC-Conference, knows this better than most people as he...

Dr Anita Goel on Personalized medicine It’s nice to know you’re special. Anita Goel backs this up with science, showing that no two people are alike in their molecular profiles, and as such no two treatments can be alike. Tailored diagnostics – personalized medicine has come to our doorsteps. Covered with ivy, Dr. Goel is a product of Harvard-MIT and Stanford, a physicist, a physician, founder and CEO of Nanobiosym, a company that has a not-so-humble vision to “to revolutionize healthcare globally.” She states that their goal is to give patients worldwide real-time access to their own diagnostic information via low-cost handheld devices and provide a personalized approach to cure through one’s genetic makeup. So what, individualism is the new holism? For more, check out the TEDx site: Dr Anita Goel: healthcare at your digital fingertips

Santa Claus look alike, Dr. Howard-Yana Shapiro , talks of chocolate through 26 Mayan languages. Where does cacao come from and why does this matter? Being the global director of plant science and external research at Mars Incorporated, he shares with us the buzz phrase of today= sustainable cacao . Chocolate matters! But not in the way we imagine, Christmas stockings and all. He says, "everything is on the move, forced by nature," meaning that to satisfy our love for chocolate, we need to start thinking of its effect on people and cultures, nurturing nature and naturalizing this nurturing as a habit of the future. He approaches this through the eyes of a scientist and anthropologist, an important and yet surprisingly rare combination in the field. "We will not certify poverty!" he stresses, talking of how deforestation is deeply connected to chocolate and how corporations need to equate business models with eco-models, where co-dependency is but a must. According t...

Green bordered Press Passes and RESERVED written on red velvet seats...its nice being the Press! Cookies and koffie; polaroids being taken to give some kind of instant energy feeling; long-bearded men, probably all eco-warriors or physicists... spotted! Admittedly, as we blog away with our Apple computers in a row (with every other minute checking Facebook), we're deeply concerned about more pressing issues such as what we should do with our goodie bags post conference when we go for the after-party to Chicago Boom! Such are the troubling times we live in. Other issues do seep in such as what can we say about someone whose claim to fame is that she is the great great granddaughter of Charles Darwin...ok, but what about it? And of aliens on stage...er? and fake snow falling on a man who has come from Africa in his native costume, saying that this is the first time he has left his hometown and he receives unanimous applaud...because??? One is tempted to see this as condescending, an...

Blogging live on Alef Arendsen: Even trendy renewable energy requires PR. Granted, Al Gore helped to make climate change a topic again. But for the most part it’s been all about what you can do for the world and not for yourself. The New Motion, a company about “electric mobility powered by renewable energy,” turns this around. “If we want to create lasting change, we have to accept the premise that we act on self-interest,” says Alef Arendsen, one of the co-founders. For more, check out the TEDx blog site: Alef Arendsen: Fixing my problem fixes yours

Jon Rosenfeld from Boom Chicago , an Amsterdam comedy institution known for its live shows and video productions is hosting TEDx Amsterdam today. He starts for sure with a bang, a boom and happily no bust, cracking up the audience with his witty oneliners such as, "we're all TEDheads here. We're the nerds from high school that made it!" or "we're the Economist readers ...we have that secret nudge, that all knowing wink of getting off on an orgy of ideas" and more, paving way for Prof. dr. Gerardus 't Hooft , the Nobel Prize winner in Physics. Now thats a hard act to follow! In fact, I believe usually scientists do not usually follow comedians when launching into their talks on how nuclear energy transforms the world. So well, kudos to him as he slowly works his way to engaging us with his facetious warning that, "blackholes are not safe to be close to...it can be dangerous!" While starting with the cliche of beam me up Scotty which is oh w...

So, fanatic that I am for TED conferences ...well, actually, calling this a conference is akin to calling caviar food or the ipad a computer. The cult of TED is more like it, from Ideas Worth Spreading to Fanaticism Worth Holding onto! It all started in the oh so cliche California where people came together to give "the talk of their lives " er...in 18 minutes. (Andy Warhol promised a 5 minute fame so lets just say inflation just kicked in). It started by pontificating about Technology, Entertainment and Design and now has spread to any topic that can be delivered in a way that will make an audience feel cool n cutting edge, and if you can squeeze in a tear or two from them, more the power to you! Ah and did I mention this is an invite only event, nurturing the VIP instinct amongst an eclectic group of people who need reassurances of their role in life like myself? There is nothing like a good dose of intellectual elitism to get people's attention...simple supply and de...