Northwoods Alchemy

If you are a regular – or occasional – reader of Andy’s Global View (www.amglobal.blogspot.com), you’ll know that one of my goals is to try to think over the horizon a bit, looking at technology and development issues in new ways, focusing on Emerging Markets.

Well I am happy to say that our world just got bigger. This week I will be attending the Pop!Tech (www.poptech.com) conference in Camden, Maine as a “guest blogger” –covering the conference as combination commentator and gadfly, and bringing our well known sense of “why not” to the north woods.

For those of you that have not heard about it, Pop!Tech is unlike other conferences – in fact it is in a class by itself. Described last year by the New York Times as “Davos for Cool People”, Pop!Tech is aimed at bringing together speakers from private companies, the NGO world, and the arts to consider “what’s next?” in the way we use technology and absorb new ideas. Presenters at Pop!Tech 2007 range from Jessica Flannery, the Founder of Kiva to Grammy Award Winner John Legend, and Robert Boroffice the head of Nigeria’s Space and Research Program. From the tech industry, we have the likes of Yahoo! and Nokia.

As part of my participation, I will be blogging extensively, covering sessions and interviewing speakers and participants. For this week the blog will take a slightly different form – more posts, more topics, perhaps more informal - so I’ve decided to give this series of dispatches a title all its own in honor of our surroundings: Northwoods Alchemy.

So get ready, get set. Stay tuned for some musings about what happens when some of the smartest and most creative people around come together to talk about technology and the future.

Cheers,

Andrew

P.S. Even if you can’t make it to Pop!Tech tune in live by visiting: http://www.poptech.com/live