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About Nicholas Negroponte:
A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Negroponte was perhaps best known for founding and directing MIT’s Media Lab, which helped drive the multimedia revolution and now houses more than 500 researchers and staff. An original investor in WIRED (and the magazine’s “patron saint”), for five years he penned a column exploring the frontiers of technology — ideas that he expanded into his 1995 best-selling book Being Digital. An angel investor extraordinaire, he’s funded more than 40 startups, and served on the boards of companies such as Motorola and Ambient Devices.

But his latest effort, the One Laptop per Child project, may prove his most ambitious. The organization is manufacturing the XO (the “$100 laptop”), a wireless Internet-enabled, pedal-powered computer costing roughly $100. Negroponte hopes to put millions of these devices in the hands of the children in the developing world by 2010.

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About Kevin Kelly:
Perhaps there is no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change — bad? good? too slow? too bold? — than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value of technology. Whether by renouncing all material things save his bicycle (which he then rode 3,000 miles), founding an organization (the All-Species Foundation) to catalog all life on earth, or by touting new gadgets in WIRED, Kelly hasn’t stopped exploring the phenomena of technical and biological creation.

In articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others, he has celebrated scientific breakthroughs, and at the Long Now Foundation, where he serves on the board, he champions projects that look 10,000 years into the future. Today Kelly is at work on a book that asks what appears to be his life’s core question: “How should I think about new technology when it comes along?”

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About Tom Davenport:
Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, where he also leads the Process Management and Working Knowledge Research Centers. His books and articles on business process reengineering, knowledge management, attention management, knowledge worker productivity, and analytical competition helped to establish each of those business ideas. His website is tomdavenport.com.

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About Josh Bernoff:
Josh Bernoff, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, has risen in thirteen years to become one of America’s most frequently quoted research analysts. Josh’s analysis, which aims at a deeper understanding of people and how they use technology, has been cited by sources from The Wall St. Journal to “60 Minutes.”

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About Eric Haseltine:
Haseltine is associate director for science and technology for the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI), where he is responsible for ensuring that U.S. intelligence stays on the cutting edge of research and development.

Haseltine bears one of the more colorful résumés at the DNI. A former director of engineering for Hughes Aircraft, he served as head of R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he managed the Virtual Reality Studio and oversaw key technology initiatives for the Disney Co. After Disney, he joined the code-breaking, eavesdropping National Security Agency as R&D chief, then began work for the DNI in June last year.

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About John Maeda:
John Maeda is a programmer and an artist — and is committed to blurring the lines between the two disciplines. As a student at MIT, studying computer programming, the legendary Muriel Cooper persuaded him to follow his parallel passion for fine art and design. And when computer-aided design began to explode in the mid-1990s, Maeda was in a perfect position to influence and shape the form, helping typographers and page designers explore the freedom of the web.

He jokes about himself as “the guy who makes the flying letters.” But behind this joke is a deep insight into the way good programming can create new forms of good design — the guiding principle of Web 2.0, where type and images can behave in brand-new ways to communicate and amuse.

He’s the author of several books, including his latest, The Laws of Simplicity, and the retrospective MAEDA @ MEDIA.

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About Hector Ruiz:
Hector Ruiz is chairman and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Born in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Dr. Ruiz is passionate about the role of technology in education and empowering the underprivileged. At the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos, he announced AMD’s 50×15 Initiative, a commitment to provide 50 percent of the world’s population with basic Internet access by the year 2015.

Ruiz contends that his company’s 50×15 initiative is “not only possible; it is perhaps the most important transformational event we will experience in our lifetime.”

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About Clifford Stoll:
When Clifford Stoll speaks, you can’t help but listen. Full of restless energy, he jumps from one topic to the next, darting back and forth across the stage. You may not be sure where he’s going, but the ride is always part of the adventure.

An astronomer (though his astronomy career took a turn when he noticed a bookkeeping error that ultimately led him to track down a notorious hacker), researcher and internationally recognized computer security expert — who happens to be a vocal critic of technology — Stoll makes a sharp, witty case for keeping computers out of the classroom. Currently teaching college-level physics to eighth graders at a local school, he stays busy in his spare time building Klein bottles.

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About Douglas Merrill:
Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry. Dr. Eric Schmidt joined Google as chairman and chief executive officer in 2001.

Formerly a senior vice president at Charles Schwab; worked at Price Waterhouse and the RAND Corp.; ran a small consulting company in Southwest Asia; taught at Northwestern; has a doctorate in psychology at Princeton.

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About Howard Rheingold:
As Howard Rheingold himself puts it, “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net.” A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.

His 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to cofound HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.

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About David Pogue:
Which cell phone to choose? What software to buy? Are camera-binoculars a necessity or novelty? As release cycles shorten and ever-shrinking gadgets hit the market with dizzying speed, it’s harder and harder to know what’s worth the investment. A tireless explorer of everyday technology, David Pogue investigates all the options so we don’t have to.

After happily weathering installation nightmares, customer service hiccups, and an overwhelming crush of backups, upgrades and downloads, Pogue reports back with his recommendations via his many columns, TV appearances and how-to books. And he does it all with relatable insight, humor and an unsinkable sense of pun, er, fun. All that, and he sings, too.

[Courtsey: Ted]

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About Robin Chase:
If she weren’t a proven start-up entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, some dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. Or if she weren’t such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a businesswoman only. Ultimately, the best way to understand Chase is simply as a remarkable innovator.

Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on founding Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key system and Internet billing, members pick up Zipcars at myriad locations anytime they want one. The idea is at once ordinary and highly sophisticated, with powerful technologies applied to tasks as prosaic as grocery shopping. But the result couldn’t be more straightforward: fewer cars, less carbon.

Since its founding, Zipcar has doubled in size every year, making Chase’s biggest ideas and her latest company, GoLoco, look mighty promising.

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About Bill Stone:
Engineer and daredevil explorer Bill Stone is obsessed with discovery. After years of crawling through the deepest unexplored caves on the planet, he’s building robots to go where he can’t. His company Stone Aerospace built DepthX, an autonomous robot, which descended 1,099 feet down Mexico’s deepest watery sinkhole. By 2008 he’ll send an enhanced machine through the ice of Lake Bonney in the Antarctic. But that’s just a test for the real mission, building a probe with Nasa to bore through miles of ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa, then swim through the buried Europan sea in search of alien life.

He’s also hoping to singlehandedly jump-start commercial human space exploration by offering spacefarers affordable fuels and consumables extracted from the moon. His new Shackleton Energy Company, or SEC, intends to raise $15 billion (as he points out, this is about the cost of a North Sea oil production platform complex) to mine ice thought to be trapped on the moon’s southern pole at  Shackleton Crater, and to sell derived products (including propellants and other consumables) on the moon and in low earth orbit (LEO) to international consumers. If all goes well, SEC will be open for business as early as 2015 as an international energy company.

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About Jan Chipcase:
Jan Chipcase can guess what’s inside your bag and knows all about the secret contents of your refrigerator. It isn’t a second sight or a carnival trick; he knows about the ways we think and act because he’s spent years studying our behavioral patterns. He’s traveled from country to country to learn everything he can about what makes us tick, from our relationship to our phones (hint: it’s deep, and it’s real) to where we stow our keys each night.

Jan’s discoveries and insights help inspire the development of the next generations of phones and services at Nokia. As he puts it, if he does his job right, you should be seeing the results of his research hitting the streets and airwaves within the next 3 to 15 years.

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About Hod Lipson:
To say that Hod Lipson and his team at Cornell build robots is not completely accurate: They may simply set out a pile of virtual robot parts, devise some rules for assembly, and see what the parts build themselves into. They’ve created robots that decide for themselves how they want to walk; robots that develop a sense of what they look like; even robots that can, through trial and error, construct other robots just like themselves.

Working across disciplines — physics, computer science, math, biology and several flavors of engineer — the team studies techniques for self-assembly and evolution that have great implications for fields such as micro-manufacturing — allowing tiny pieces to assemble themselves at scales heretofore impossible — and extreme custom manufacturing (in other words, 3-D printers for the home).

His lab’s Outreach page is a funhouse of tools and instructions, including the amazing Golem @ Home — a self-assembling virtual robot who lives in your screensaver.

She spends the first half of the video describing how important mobile phones have become to us and that they have become so ubiquitous that a third of the global population owns one. The second half is spent on the challenges facing cellphones today and how new usage models will solve social problems that we as humans have always had to deal with.

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About Younghee Jung:
Younghee Jung is senior interaction designer in Nokia’s User Experience unit. In Nokia, Younghee specializes in developing future product concepts, incubating the product concepts before they are ‘adopted’ in the productization line, and creating evolutionary roadmaps of core applications of mobile phones. Her past endeavours include the incubation research for Nokia Lifeblog and she is currently working on creating the vision for mobile phonebook application. Her passion is to learn and understand various cultures of humanity and make contribution to enrich them via design. She studied interaction design at Carnegie Mellon University as a Fulbright scholar, and industrial design at KAIST, South Korea.

Wu led with his thoughts on the the difference between the laws and culture of the telephone versus the computer. The former is closed and controlled whereas the latter is more open. In the near future, what will happen with these two different worlds? Which will prevail?

Wu believes the copyright tension in the next few years will be between control (making money off content) and exposure. Several questions will be answered in the near future. How do you preserve openness yet cash in at some magic moment? How will people creating content make money? He thinks people will figure out a way.

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About Tim Wu:
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. He is the co-author of Who Controls the Internet? (Oxford U. Press 2006), and a writer for Slate Magazine. In 2006 Wu was recognized as one 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine for his work on Network Neutrality theory.

Tim Wu previously worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc), and Harvard Law School, and has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, and Stanford Law School.

Wu has written for various legal publications, and also the Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, Slate Magazine, Playboy, and others. He is on the advisory board of Free Press, Public Knowledge, and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

About Jeffrey Toobin:
Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, former legal analyst for ABC News. Toobin has provided broadcast legal analysis on many high profile cases, including Michael Jackson, the O.J. Simpson civil trial and the Starr investigation of President Clinton. He received a 2000 Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elián González custody saga.

Earlier in his career, he served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, as well as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh during the Iran-Contra affair and Oliver North’s criminal trial.

Toobin earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Toobin has written several critically acclaimed, best-selling books including A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President; The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson; and Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election.

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About Mike McCready:
Mike McCready is an entrepreneur and executive in the international music industry and has been referred to as the founder of the field of Music Intelligence. Mike grew up in both Ord and Broken Bow, Nebraska and now lives in Manhattan and Barcelona. He currently serves as CEO of Platinum Blue Music Intelligence a company he co-founded with another leader in the music intelligence field, Tracie Reed.

Platinum Blue uses technology to analyze the underlying mathematical properties of music in order to generate insightful music recommendations and to help create and market hit songs for major music labels and top producers. Before co-founding Platinum Blue he co-founded and served as CEO at Polyphonic HMI from November 2001 to December 2005.

He has recently joined the advisory board of an exciting company in Dallas, Texas called Dremāk. The company is installing mini-recording and audition studios in shopping malls and commercial centers which will allow budding artists to record demos, audition for opportunities in Hollywood or Broadway without having to travel or just have a professional record of their work.

About Malcolm Gladwell:
Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises — counterintuitive truths discovered by clever researchers, obscure historians, and ordinary people observing the world. In his first year as a staff writer at the “New Yorker in 1996, he captivated readers with an article titled “The Tipping Point,” which grappled with a mysterious sudden drop in New York City crime, by applying the principles of epidemiology to policing. “The Tipping Point” ultimately became a book and has remained on the New York Times best-seller lists for years.

Meanwhile, Gladwell has gone on to explore similar mismatches — mammography and fighter jets (it’s all about seeing), pit bulls and racial profiling, Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma — writing cross-disciplinary articles that illuminate hidden facts about group behavior, business and individual selves. Gladwell began 2007 with a controversial look at the Enron case, distinct from all the reportage that’s come before.

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About James Surowiecki:
James Surowiecki is the foremost authority on how to harness the collective wisdom of your organization for competitive advantage. He has written a well-received book on the theory and practice of “The Wisdom of Crowds—Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few And How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies And Nations”.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, Jim describes systematic ways to organize and aggregate the intelligence available in your organization in order to arrive at superior decisions—often better than those that individuals would make, even if they are ‘experts’.

The book and Jim’s presentations based on the book are full of insights into how groups operate that are invaluable to business leaders. He also offers practical methods, tailored to his audience, for leveraging people and technology to learn what you need to know and make decisions that really serve the organization’s goals.

Jim writes a twice-monthly financial column for The New Yorker that is typically pegged to current events and incorporates the kind of insights from economics, sociology, and business history that make The Wisdom of Crowds so valuable.

He has written for a broad range of other publications on a wide variety of topics. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal and other major publications. He wrote “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine, and was a contributing editor at Fortune.