Highlights from the Innovation Summit

I’m here on Day 3 of the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford. Like last year, I’m concentrating on photos (see below and later above), and adding some video (on Ourmedia in a week or two) as well.

Some nice coverage at TechCrunch. Much more at Technorati and at Feedster.

Here are some of the best quotes and factoids I’ve plucked out from the past three days:

David Sifry of Technorati: There were 3 million blogs a year ago, 12 million today. On Technorati, there were zero social media tags in January and 20 million today. (We’ll post a one-minute video about this on Ourmedia soon.)

Pioneer venture capitalist Bill Draper to the innovators in the crowd creating new companies, products and services: “You’re the heroes.”

Author George Gilder: “Wifi and Wimax are desperate attempts by the old guard” — Intel, etc. — to prevent the takeover by people who just want to use their cellphones.

More Gilder: “Nanotech is really the extension of Moore’s Law, that things will get better as they grow smaller, as we move into the pit of

More Gilder: “The real author of Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’sl Law of Accelerating Returns is Henry Adams.”

More Gilder: “Television is dying fast and it’ll be followed by Hollywood. These industries fed on scarcity because there were only a few channels available. TV could dominate. TV was the technology of tyrants. It’s living on and emitting fumes in our living rooms. The 30-second ad spot is gonna die. This AlwaysOn represents the triumph of the user as the user becomes a producer.”

More Gilder: “The Long Tail is the fulfillment of life after television. Amazon gets 60% of its revenue from below the top 100,000 best sellers.”

Final Gilder: Television is a medium based on the lowest common deniminator. “The culture of television kills itself by stultifying its viewers.
Blog culture is part of book culture and can redeem the civilization.”

Mark Cuban had the best line of the conference. He said of telling young people not to pirate music or movies: “It’s like trying to tell a 12 year old boy that he’s going to go blind.”

Kim Polese: “We’re not going back to the old way, to silos, to lock-in.
IT is now in the driver’s seat.”

Marlen Mickos: Very few people buy a car with the hood sealed shut. At the same time, few people open up the hood to look at the engine. Yet they like the idea that they, or their friends, can peek under the hood when they want to.

Doc Searls: Microsoft’s “Passport was a bad idea that didn’t work.”

More Doc: “Flickr is a walled garden. It’s a beautiful walled garden, but it’s still a walled garden.”

More Doc: “Hollywood is trying to close the Web down. … The assumption is the Net is open and free, but we’re essentially at war with Hollywood, which wants to close it down.”

Toni Schneider, VP of the Yahoo Developer Network: Flickr is closed in that it’s not open to anyone to post photos on his own server and join the Flickr community. But if they opened it up to everyone, the model would likely break.

Technorati tags: AlwaysOn, AO2005, AlwaysOn 2005, Hollywood

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.