At the urging of a friend, I attended the BIL 2010 Conference. BIL is 3 years running and is usually situated near the TED Conference (devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading). The event is free and open to all guest presenters. Usually scientists, futurists, technologists, artists, venture capitalists speak on inspirational and oftentimes niche topics. Usually with a Powerpoint presentation up their sleeves. They are able to throw the entire conference for less than the cost of one TED ticket. Tickets to TED run around $6000. As you can guess, TED caters to millionaires, captains of industry, and invited guess geniuses and creatives. Fledgling BIL, doesn’t cater to millionaires and embodies a true DIY aesthetic.

This year the venue was the Museum of Latin American Art down in Long Beach which felt far to me, as I’ve fallen out of the habit of going to these events. I should mention that I was rewarded for venturing out as I was one of a handful of people who won a free palm-sized HD video camera compliments of Google, one of the sponsors of the event. It looks like an iPod with a lens mounted flush on one of its sides and a flip out usb plug. This one.

These were two of my favorite presentations at BIL.

The first talk of the conference set the bar pretty high: it was a Powerpoint presentation with video by Steve Jurvetson about his enthusiasm for model rocketry. His profile on Wikipedia reads:

He was a Venture Capitalist (VC) investor in Hotmail, Interwoven, and Kana. He also led the firm’s investments in Tradex and Cyras (acquired by Ariba and Ciena, respectively). Current Board seats include NeoPhotonics, SpaceX, Synthetic Genomics, Tesla Motors and Wowd.
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At Stanford University, Jurvetson finished his degree in electrical engineering in 2.5 years and graduated #1 in his class. He then earned an M.S. in electrical engineering and an M.B.A., also from Stanford.

Steve Jurvetson has a blog at http://jurvetson.blogspot.com

My other favorite was the presentation by Brad Templeton, “Before the Robot Cars.” On the BIL website he says:

At BIL 2008 I introduced the future of robotic cars. But they’re still a decade away. This talk will focus on technologies that are on the near term horizon, or even available now. It will also outline new thinking in the design of transportation and energy based on modern computer technology that can be used while the people are still driving. I’ll show videos of cars today avoiding pedestrians and valet parking themselves, and simulations of intersections without stoplights taking us down the path to automatic transportation.

His bio on the BIL site hints at the big impact he (and the groups he’s represented) has had on shaping the nature of the internet, especially by fighting the good fight for our personal freedoms. In some ways, I think of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a better purer version of the ACLU:

Brad Templeton has just completed a 10 year term as Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights defender in cyberspace. He is also on the boards of the Foresight Institute and BitTorrent Inc. He was founder of ClariNet.com, the internet’s first dot-com, rec.humor.funny and Looking Glass Software. He is also a panoramic photographer and Burning Man artist.

His photography is at www.templetons.com/brad/pano and his homepage is at http://www.templetons.com/brad.

The BIL website is at http://2010.bilconference.com