Pop!Tech 2008

Since David VanAmburg turned me on to PopTech last year, I've been anxiously awaiting this year's speakers. This year's conference looks as if it will be just as electric as 2007. Yahoo will once again live stream the event between October 23-25. This year's theme is scarcity and abundance.

This year, we will pay particular attention to the 21st century dynamics between systems based on scarcity and those based on abundance, in areas ranging from digital social networks to environmentalism, from biology to business, from peacemaking to politics. We’ll chart the core scarcities that humanity will face in this century, and how a wealth of new innovations, new bottom-up approaches to collaboration, and new insights into collective wisdom might hold the key to addressing them.

The guest speakers who have been scheduled so far for this year's conference can be found here. I'm listing a few below that have caught my interest and I will make a special effort to watch. If you can't make it for the conference or the live stream, I'm almost certain the pop!casts will be posted at a later date. View the introductary video for the conference below as well.

• Stephen Badylak, who has been leading the field on regenerative medicine with his work with extracellular matrix. Badylak is currently a research professor at the University of Pittsburgh.


• Saul Griffith, is a co-founder of Instructables.com as well as a number of other companies, including Lowcost Eyeglasses. He is a proponent of open-source information and co-writes the comic HowToons.


• Matt Mason, co-founder of the nonprofit Wedia, and author of the book, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism.


• Jay Parkinson defines himself as a new doctor for a new century. Ray Parkinson M.D., has an unusual practice that utilizes a unique doctor/patient interaction. Parkinson's practice uses the communication tools of the Internet. Through Hello Health, Parkinson and his colleagues provide care to any age patient, insured or not.