World Technology Summit & Awards

I had hoped to attend the World Technology Summit & Awards taking place Wednesday and Thursday in Manhattan, but between last week’s trip to the UK and next week’s trip to Los Angeles, I couldn’t manage another long trip right now.

Still, I’m honored to be among the nominees for the 2009 World Technology Award for Media and Journalism:

Timur Aitov, ITAR-TASS
Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research
Keith Cowing, NASA Watch / SpaceRef / OnOrbit
Rene Daalder, American Scenes Inc
Rebecca Fannin, Silicon Dragon & AVCJ
Dan Farber, Cnet
Michael S. Gazzaniga, University of California
JD Lasica, writer
Steven Levy, Wired
Charlene Li, Altimeter Group
Jared Lipworth, Thirteen/WNET New York
Dan Medovnikov, Valeriy Fadeev, and Irik Imamutdinov, Expert Magazine
Michael Rogers, The New York Times
Jim Romenesko, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies
Paul Steiger, ProPublica
Kinsey Wilson, NPR Digital Media

This year’s theme is “How to save the future.” Other nominees include Thomas Friedman, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Rod Beckstrom, Dean Kamen, Olympia Snowe, Julius Genachowski, Ben Stein, Tim Berners-Lee and Matt Mullenweg.

I had heard about the Summit and awards program in past years, largely because I know some of the past winners and nominees, including Craig Newmark, Dewayne Hendricks, Ted Cohen, Tim Westergren, Chad Hurley, Jeff Skoll, Al Gore, Elon Musk (all 2006 honorees) and Dan Gillmor.

The gathering is put on each year by the World Technology Network in association with Time magazine, NASDAQ, Fortune magazine, the Mayo Clinic, Science magazine and New York Academy of Sciences, among others. The two-day summit at the Time & Life Building concludes with a black-tie awards gala ceremony to honor “the most innovative and impactful people” in the worlds of science, technology and tech media.

What’s gratifying is that the nominees are nominated by past nominees and that we become fellows of the World Technology Network even if we’re not able to attend the summit. Hope to learn more about the network in the coming weeks, and I hope someone Twitters from the event!
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.