Session 1 – The State of the Geek Universe

The first session is over and we’re off to a great start.  The amazing young violinists from the Hammer Band kicked us off with O Canada.  Conductor Moshe Hammer told us of his vision to “have music in every school everywhere,” and that violins are better than violence.

Our first speaker of the day Don Tapscott really set the stage about the state of the geek universe and where we all stand within it, the youth are lapping their parents with technology and he encouraged individuals to find themselves a reverse mentor.  Just remember folks: the kids are alright.

Next up was photographer Rick Smolan who offered us up the concept of Big Data, we’re currently in our ‘caveman era’ and are moving forward in leaps and bounds.  We’re reaching a tipping point in our history today where more of our data is being manufactured by machines – servers, cell phones, GPS enabled, cars – rather than by actual people.  We now have the ability to open up thousands eyes and have thousands of senses of dimension, we can see things that we’ve never been able to see before.

Finally we wrapped up this session with the first family of tech: The Jain’s.  Father Naveen was joined on stage by his two incredible children Ankur and Priyanka, to have a chat about philanthropy and how you can change the world.  Although not many people in the audience raised their hands to becoming a billionaire, we were all encouraged to find the biggest problem we want to solve and go out and do something about it!

That wraps up our first session, on a positive note, go out and change the world, and as Naveen Jain says “you don’t need to think outside the box, you need to think in an entirely different box.”