BarCamp Sarasota emphasizes the intersection of technology, education, and economic development. Building a community through user-generated conferences, participatory workshops, lunch and learn and after-hour events; the open forum format is born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.

Join us Saturday, October 9th for our Sarasota Fall Technology Festival.

About two and a half years ago after “losing” but really winning, because it was forced open the FCC’s 700Mhz spectrum auction, Google turned its sights to a new goal: the opening of the so-called “white space”. White space is the name given to the vacant airwaves between television channels, airwaves which are increasingly open as people move to cable and other methods of getting television. These airwaves have the potential to carry wireless data at speeds and distances that would make today’s WiFi seem antiquated. That’s why the white space has earned the nickname “WiFi 2.0″ or “WiFi on steroids”.

And after an FCC vote today, it’s finally a go.The FCC voted unanimously 5-0 to adopt rules for using the white space. This means that companies like Google can start getting to work coming up with ways on how they want to use them. Of course, you can bet they’ve already been thinking about that for the past two and a half years, and probably longer. So now it’s time to execute.

via “WiFi On Steroids” Is A Go. Now Google Or Someone Just Has To Build It. Please Do. Fast..

I recall that we spent an entire term on Descartes’ Meditations, the work that led the French philosopher to his famous declaration: “I think, therefore I am.” It was a slim volume, yet we micro-analysed every last semi-colon of its tortured arguments. To do well, we had to find flaws in the philosopher’s reasoning. Our adolescent critiques spoke to no one outside our precious circle. To be a successful scholar was to regard inwards, and wade into an ever-denser intellectual world that made scant connection with contemporary realities.

Thirty years on, in the very same venue, TED is doing the precise opposite. It regards ideas as a kind of currency that has not been circulating freely enough to achieve its full potential. The most important thing about them is not that they should withstand the obsessive scrutiny of guileless teenage minds, but that they should be original, inspiring, accessible, and that they should do good. They are catering, in Giusanni’s words, for an “incredible thirst” for knowledge and information, and projecting a “new sense of possibility in a world that is becoming submerged by bad news”.

TED talks are a clever mix of the light-hearted, the analytical, and the rawly emotional. There is a high tolerance for the last category that is perhaps difficult for the notoriously sceptical British sensibility to swallow. When Annie Lennox, the singer and humanitarian activist, gives her talk on HIV/Aids in Africa, she chooses to concentrate on a positive story, showing before and after pictures of a little girl who received life-saving treatment for her condition. She is visibly moved as she recounts the transformation: “I don’t know if you can see the hairs on my arms … ” We can’t, but pretend that we do. Giussani says there is a “lower intensity of cynicism” in a TED audience than in the outside world.

The show-stopper of day one is Naif Al-Mutawa, a bearded, bespectacled clinical psychologist and creator of The 99, a comic book project that showcases enlightened Muslim values in the guise of superheroes. They are shortly about to interact, thanks to some cross-cultural co-operation between publishers, with DC Comics’ Justice League of America in an ultimate act of pop culture détente. Al-Mutawa’s talk is fast-moving, touching and witty (he describes recently manning a food stall advertising “Free Falafel”, only for an earnest would-be protester to ask him: “Who’s Falafel?”) He gets an ovation and his talk is among the first to be made available from this conference on the TED website.

The quality of TED talks is frequently astonishing, word-perfect, immaculately-timed, shuffling potentially dense information in the lightest of ways. The time slot, 18 minutes, shorter than a Pink Floyd tune-up, seems perfectly prescribed for the average attention span, given that you have to listen to five in succession. You can take a break from the intense atmosphere of the Playhouse by watching a simulcast at the nearby Randolph hotel, where there is a more social vibe, and what seems to be the highest incidence of hugs and iPads per square metre in the western world.

via FT.com / weekend columnists / Peter Aspden – Conference of cool.

TED was founded in 1984, the brainchild of US architect and designer Richard Saul Wurman, who had noticed the convergence of themes in the worlds that would constitute the organisation’s title. At that first conference, held in California, there were demos of the newly released Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc. It was attended by many of the world’s leading IT thinkers, including Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky.The conference didn’t pay its way, and was not held again for another six years, by which time the idea behind it – to promulgate “ideas worth spreading” – had found its time. Since then the conference has been held every year in California and attracted a stellar, and sometimes unexpected, line-up of speakers: Bill Gates, Frank Gehry, Al Gore, Billy Graham, Peter Gabriel, Quincy Jones, Bono. In 2001, the conference was acquired by Chris Anderson, a British computer magazine publisher and entrepreneur, via his Sapling Foundation and has cemented its status as a non-profit venture that is gradually spreading its message, most notably through its website, which freely posts TED talks from the conferences online.Such is the appeal of TED, which is routinely described as a cross between Glastonbury and Davos, that it even attracts improbable celebrities: actresses Cameron Diaz and Meg Ryan and basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar have been spotted in its audiences in recent years, forcing the implementation of one of the conference’s strictest rules, banning the reporting of attendees: “It is not cool to tweet that you are sitting next to a celebrity,” explains Giussani at one point between sessions, to nervous laughter and furtive sidelong glances.TEDGlobal is the original’s sister conference and has now settled into its Oxford home to nurture its internationalist ambitions. There is a strong streak of idealism behind the conference: a fundamental belief that the free and promiscuous flow of ideas has the potential to make the world a better place. At this particular conference, there is a raft of concrete, uplifting, practicable proposals suggesting that our planet can be saved by the apparently simple process of its most brilliant thinkers connecting with each other. Matt Ridley, a British author and self-styled “rational optimist”, puts it more colourfully in his 18 minutes on the first day: ideas are at their best “when they have sex” and procreate younger, fitter ideas in their place. The audience loves this talk, because it makes ideas sound sexy, and possibly because it has the side-effect of making sex sound profound. Steven Berlin Johnson, author of the bestseller Everything Bad Is Good For You, which argues that popular culture and video games have made us smarter, continues the theme with another memorable slogan later that afternoon, in his talk on how ideas are produced: “Chance favours the connected mind.”

via FT.com / weekend columnists / Peter Aspden – Conference of cool.