TED 2013: ‘Factivist’ Bono projects poverty rate of zero by 2030

Bill Gates tweeted this photo of Bono's TED Talk on poverty.Bill Gates tweeted this photo of Bono’s TED talk on poverty Tuesday. (Bill Gates / February 26, 2013)

By Chris O’Brien
February 26, 2013

Bono said during his talk Tuesday at the TED conference in Long Beach that he was asked by TED organizer Chris Anderson to give an overview of the last 10 years of anti-poverty efforts. But theU2 lead singer and international activist was more interested in looking at where these efforts could go in the next two decades with the help of technology and social media.

“I thought, forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, the only thing I would be singing today is the facts,” Bono said. “For I have truly embraced my inner nerd.

“So, exit the rock star. Enter the evidence activist. The ‘factivist.’ ”

This wasn’t Bono’s first turn at TED. Back in 2005, he was one of the winners of the first TED Prizes, which awarded $100,000 to the winners. Bono’s prize went to helping his One.org project get off the ground. The goal: “Engage millions around the world to take action in the fight against the absurdity of extreme poverty. Because where you live shouldn’t determine whether you live.” (more…)

British woman, 79, becomes martial-arts action hero

latimes.com
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Re-Post April 2013

Kay D’Arcy spent decades as a nurse, midwife and mother before jumping into Hollywood. Now she stars as an acrobatic assassin in the Web series ‘Agent 88,’ doing many of her own stunts.

Kay D’Arcy didn’t expect what Hollywood had in store for her.

At an age when others have been relegated to playing invalids and dowagers, D’Arcy will appear as Agent 88, an assassin who keeps the deadly tools of her trade tucked into her hair bun. The octogenarian avenger dispenses evildoers with acrobatic moves that would impress Jackie Chan.

In the opening episode of the Web series “Agent 88,” D’Arcy demonstrates her martial arts skills in an encounter with thugs surrounding the bloodied body of their victim.

“Get lost,” one villain tells her, and knocks her to the ground.

“I really wish you hadn’t done that,” she says, and springs into action.

PHOTOS: Vigilante movies – Taking matters into one’s own hands

With lethal efficiency, she neutralizes them all — delivering round-house kicks that send one crashing to the ground, pulling daggers from her bun and hurling them at another assailant, and twirling Kali fighting sticks to batter two others. (more…)

Despite Grammy-level success, tiny Nashville label Dualtone still remains under the radar

Nashville Scene
Why Dualtone Matters
by @MAXBLAU

Around this time last year, Wesley Schultz was working an array of part-time service industry jobs in Denver, Colo. For the better part of a decade, he had toiled in hopes of someday becoming a full-time musician.

One year later, The Lumineers frontman has received two Grammy nominations — for Best New Artist and Best Americana Album — as well as a gold record. While Schultz has witnessed the way songs like “Ho Hey” and “Stubborn Love” resonate with fans, he acknowledges that it wouldn’t have happened without Dualtone Records, a Nashville-based label with only five full-time staff members.

“We spent a lot of time of about seven or eight years of really nothing happening,” Schultz says. “[Dualtone] is a lot more hands-on and nurturing and tries to help something delicate develop. That’s what we needed. We needed people to believe in it.” (more…)

Your Attitude Determines Whether Or Not You’ll Succeed

BUSINESS INSIDER
War Room Contributors

Dan Waldschmidt, Edgy Conversations
Jan. 19, 2013

The results of your actions have little to do with what you are actually doing and almost everything to do with your attitude.

Which is ironic because we spend most of our time creating lists and getting organized and listing resolutions about what we should be doing, forgetting that who we are being is much more important.

That’s why we’re called human beings. Not human doings.

Your life is full of things that you do.

Your business and family and community demand that you do certain things. Some things you are shamed into doing. Other things you do because it makes other people happy or it makes you feel fulfilled or you get paid to do them.

But doing can mask the hollowness of just going through the motions. Mindless repetition. Heartless action.

Which is why your attitude is so important. (more…)

Ridley Scott and Coke Reintroduce You to the Polar Bears in Short Film

AdvertisingAge
January 2013

Who are the Coke Polar Bears — and where did they come from? Coca-Cola, CAA Marketing and producers Ridley Scott and the late Tony Scott usher the brand into 2013 with this beautifully animated short film that features the iconic bear family, and gives them extended, developed personalities. Directed by John Stevenson (Kung Fu Panda) the film gives viewers an inside look into the bear family that has been one of the symbols of the beloved brand (which was also one of Creativity’s most creative advertisers of 2012) for years.

It has been a while since we saw the bears. They were animated and given distinct characters in Coca Cola’s Super Bowl outing last year, where Wieden & Kennedy Portland created an interactive campaign which had the bears reacting as the football game progressed.

Check it out on Creativity-Online.com, and follow @creativitymag on Twitter for more great work.

Bono Sings the Praises of Technology


MIT Technology Review

The musician and activist explains how technology provides the means to help us eradicate disease and extreme poverty.

Bono with Bill Clinton in New York City in 2011; with Steve Jobs in San Jose, California, in 2004; and with nurse Abena Wonka at a community clinic in Accra, Ghana, in 2006.

By Brian Bergstein
January 2, 201

To say that Bono is the lead singer of the rock band U2 is like saying that Thomas Edison invented the record player: it leaves out a lot of biography. The 52-year-old Irishman (born Paul Hewson) is also a technology investor and an activist who cofounded the ONE and (RED) organizations, which are devoted to eradicating extreme poverty and AIDS. He has spent years urging Western leaders to forgive the debts of poor nations and to increase funding for AIDS medicines in Africa.

Bono answered questions over e-mail from MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, about the role technologies—from vaccines to information services—can play in solving our biggest problems.

It’s 2013, and millions of people are still short of food or proper medical care. Have technologists overpromised?

The tech that’s been delivered has been staggering in its measurable achievements. For example, antiretrovirals, a complex 15-drug AIDS regimen compressed into one pill a day (now saving eight million lives); the insecticide-treated bed net (cut malaria deaths by half in eight countries in Africa in the last three years); kids’ vaccinations (saved 5.5 million lives in the last decade); the mobile phone, the Internet, and spread of information—a deadly combination for dictators, for corruption. (more…)

HOW ENTREPRENEURS CAN HELP TO FIX EDUCATION

The Kernel


MONDAY, 31 DECEMBER 2012

Image: Stock
Image: Stock

Should entrepreneurs set their sights on education? Saad Rizvi says yes.

It is impossible to anticipate what changes the next fifty years will bring, but some of the elements that will drive that change can be predicted. We face some truly fundamental challenges that need to be overcome if the nine billion people living on Earth in 2050 are to lead fulfilled lives – the nature of the economy, the health of the environment and the avoidance of catastrophic conflict, to name just three.

We also know that the pace of innovation will continue to accelerate in science and technology, posing all of us the challenge: can the search for social solutions – that seize the good from science and technology and prevent the harm – keep up? All this is happening in a G-zero world in which a historic transition from Atlantic global leadership to Pacific global leadership is evidently taking place. Meanwhile, the nature of global leadership itself is changing as the problems we seek to solve become more complex and less amenable to the diplomatic means of the Cold War and before. (more…)

7 Lessons from Building a $15-Million-a-Year Lifestyle Business with No Loans, VCs or Angel Money

Vishen draws seven important lessons he learned in the past nine years of building Mindvalley from scratch.

BY VISHEN LAKHIANI
December 2012

Since we started Mindvalley, we’ve blossomed into an award-winning company with over 100 employees and revenues past $15 million a year (50 million in Malaysian Ringgit). We’ve become one of the biggest sellers of educational content online (mostly in meditation and personal growth but we’re expanding fast into other fields). We just hit 1.3 million subscribers and our 200,000th paying student.

But best of all, we’ve done it all without ever having to take any funds or loans. Which means I currently still own 100% of my business.

It did not happen fast. Mindvalley took nine years to build. Some years were fun. Some years were pure brutal.

I started with $2,000, lost money in the first two months, became profitable in the third month and just kept reinvesting profits into the company.

But the upside is total 100% ownership and a company that is built around my lifestyle, which means that it never ever feels like “work”.

This is important to me. I’m a lifestyle entrepreneur. Mindvalley was built around my passions – meditation, personal growth, play, culture, travel and epic interior design (our offices are magical). Having total ownership means I’m not pressured by partners, boards or investors to deliver something that I’m not passionate about.

Mindvalley HQ CollageThe Mindvalley Headquarters

But the climb was hard and long. And I almost lost it all on multiple occasions. I’ve made dumb mistakes. I’ve had dizzying successes. I’ve been depressed and I’ve been high. But most of all – I’ve learned and grown. And I want to share some advice.

If I could advise younger entrepreneurs who are starting out so they avoid the dumb mistakes I made, here’s what I would say:

1. Your College Degree is Meaningless (and sometimes a liability)

I (barely) graduated from the University of Michigan School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. My GPA was just over 2.5. I just could not focus on my engineering classes completely. (more…)

How Star Wars was made

Austin Kleon
TUMBLR

A SCRAPBOOK OF STUFF I’M READING / LOOKING AT / LISTENING TO / THINKING ABOUT…
DEC 14, 2012

From a great 1979 Atlantic profile of George Lucas:

Star Wars was manufactured. When a competent corporation prepares a new product, it does market research. George Lucas did precisely that. When he says that the film was written for toys (“I love them, I’m really into that”), he also means he had merchandising in mind, all the sideshow goods that go with a really successful film. He thought of T-shirts and transfers, records, models, kits, and dolls. His enthusiasm for the comic strips was real and unforced; he had a gallery selling comic-book art in New York.

From the start, Lucas was determined to control the selling of the film, and of its by-products. “Normally you just sign a standard contract with a studio,” he says, “but we wanted merchandising, sequels, all those things. I didn’t ask for another $1 million-just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade.” Lucasfilm Ltd.,. the production company George Lucas set up in July 1971, “already had a merchandising department as big as Twentieth Century-Fox has. And it was better. When I was doing the film deal, I had already hired the guy to handle that stuff.”

…The idea of Star Wars was simply to make a “real gee-whiz movie.” It would be a high adventure film for children, a pleasure film which would be a logical end to the road down which Coppola had directed his apparently cold, remote associate. As Graffiti went out around the country, Lucas refined his ideas. He toyed with remaking the great Flash Gordon serials, with Dale Arden in peril and the evil Emperor Ming; but the owners of the rights wanted a high price and overstringent controls on how their characters were used. Instead, Lucas began to research. “I researched kids’ movies,” he says, “and how they work and how myths work; and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy-tale genre which made them successful.” Some of his conclusions were almost fanciful. “I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far-off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For Victorian England it was India or North Africa or treasure islands. For America it was Out West. There had to be strange savages and bizarre things in an exotic land. Now the last of that mythology died out in the mid-1950s, with the last of the men who knew the Old West. The last ‘over the hill’ is space.”

Seth Godin on When You Should Start Marketing Your Product, Service, or Idea

Copyblogger
by 

What is marketing?

Is it a process of gathering as much money as you can,throwing it to the “creative” winds, and hoping somethingwill come back?

Is it a practice of interrupting as many people as possible with a message they don’t care about, and never asked to receive?

Is it a performance you frantically stage around your product, service, or idea, in the final moments before launching it into the world?

Or is it something else entirely? And if it is, how and when do we employ it?

Seth Godin has been asking, answering, and living out these questions for decades. In the process, he’s written thirteen best-selling books, built dozens of companies, and crafted one of the most influential blogs on the planet.

He’s on the show today, delivering a fast and elemental definition of marketing, and what it means to engage an audience in the post-industrial era. Don’t miss this …

In this episode we discuss:

  • Seth’s definition of marketing
  • When you should start marketing your product, service, or idea
  • Why running a ton of ads just doesn’t work anymore
  • The most important element of good marketing
  • The most dangerous element of bad marketing
  • How the Internet builds trust, and why you must get it
  • A stunning example of breaking out of the old marketing system

Hit the flash player below to listen now: or copy paste

http://www.copyblogger.com/cdn-origin/audio/imfsp47.mp3