So Many Davos moments

Davos for me began on the plane from London to Zurich when I ran into Phillip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, on his way to his first Davos. I invited him to join Paul Saffo and me in the car for the three hour drive up the mountain. Great conversation you can imagine. The key insight was that within twenty years the web will evolve into second life in other words ,our web world will be the virtual world of second life.

After we arrived at registration ran into Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, always very active here. When Phillip and I got to our hotel we found it had been overbooked and we were moved for one night to anotheralong with Dave Gergen and the founders of Facebook and Linked in. As we walked to dinner we ran into Kishore Mahbubani the Dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, who joined us for dinner. We agreed to host a dinner for him in a few weeks in San Francisico on his new book on the Asian futre. On the side had a great conversation with Tim Garton Ash the British historian on how I can counter Niall Fergusons very cogent arguments for pessimism in our upcoming debate. Orville Schell dropped by our table and he and Phillip connected on how the Asia society could run global virtual meetings in Second Life. This was followed by a frustrating time trying to get on line from our temporary hotel and failing hence posting today at mid day.

And just another moment as I was writing. Vinod Khosla came walking up to discuss central solar power projects which he is investing in and we agreed to meet to discuss our shared interests when we get home. This morning it was the forecasting panel chaired by Paul Saffo. Much to my surprise there was a large turn out, even Joe Nye was there. Phil Campbell the editor of nature was there as well and we discussed the difficulty of anticipating technology in the biological era as compared to the world of IT. Biology being subject of the forces of evolution and innovation in a quite different way than IT. Then followed a session on where we are on dealing with climate change. My firend Jim Rogers was the best on the panel, but unfortunately it was not especially revealing.
Steve Roach the economist from Morgan Stanley just stopped by to chat and sends his greetings to our newest GBNer, Nick Turner. But he did say that we are entering a new finacial era characterized by a much tighter financial regulation especially of the process of securitization and a dramtic decline in American consumer spending.

This year at Davos I a doing more ethan my usual number of sessions where either I lead the session or on the panel so it means I have less leeway to control my own schedule. Many of my sessions have to do with climate, energy and water so you will be hearing alot on those issues, which figure very large this year at Davos. Well more later tonight.