The New Serendipity?
Serendipity is a fuzzy concept that has a powerful effect on our lives. More than blind luck, it's the product of lots of passion, insight, or proximity. As we live lives that are more accelerated and connected, with access to tools that help us rapidly express and investigate our ideas are we creating greater conditions for serendipity?
We'll tackle this topic with a panel of personalities who deal in serendipity daily. We'll look for patterns, themes and stories that help us understand how we all play a part in making our own luck.
Presenters
Colin Raney is a Location Director and an Associate Partner at IDEO, where he leads the Boston studio.
At IDEO, Colin helped to define and pioneer a new discipline within IDEO known as Business Design; a focus on using design methodologies to build new businesses. He's worked across a wide rage of industries, (consumer technology, retail, CPG, finance, education, automotive, pharmaceuticals, and robotics.) Prior to IDEO, Colin was a hacker/developer for large-scale telecommunication systems.
Colin sits on the advisory board of the MIT Media Lab. He has written for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Rotman magazine. He is a advisor to several early-stage companies and a mentor at Techstars, Boston. He holds and MBA from Carnegie Mellon and Bachelor's Degree from the University of North Texas.
John Perry Barlow was a Wyoming cattle rancher for many years. He also wrote songs for the Grateful Dead and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. His 1993 Wired essay, The Economy of Ideas, was the first announcement that the music industry (as we then knew it) was doomed. He is currently working on turning sewage into jetfuel.
Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is a Board Member of The New York Times Company, on the Board of The MacArthur Foundation, The Knight Foundation, Creative Commons and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation and WITNESS. He is a member of the IT Strategic Headquarters of the Japanese Cabinet. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kickstarter, Path and other Internet companies. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/). He is a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, an Emergency First Responder Instructor and a Divers Alert Network (DAN) Instructor Trainer.
Kevin Rose is a Venture Partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage and seed investments. He has deep roots as a founder and serial entrepreneur, and brings this experience to advise Google Ventures' portfolio companies.
Prior to joining Google Ventures, Kevin co-founded Milk, a mobile application development company in San Francisco. Previously Kevin was the founder of Digg, and co-founder of Revision3 and Pownce (now Six Apart). Kevin currently serves on the boards of directors of the Tony Hawk Foundation and Digg.
Kevin has been named on Bloomberg's list of “Top 25 Angel Investors,” Time's and BusinessWeek's lists of “Top 25 Most Influential People on the Web,” and MIT's list of “Top 35 Innovators under 35.”
Sunday, March 10
