BuzzMachine

Breakfast with Bono and Al with two plates on the table: environment and poverty.

Bono: “If anyone sees my band would you please not tell them that I was up this early.”

Moderator Tom Friedman asks how we’re doing and Gore summarizes in a paragraph, warning about a polar ice cap gone in five years and demanding urgent global action.

“Everybody should be clear this is a planetary emergency,” he declares. “There has been nothing remotely like it in history. We are putting at risk all of civilization. It is difficult to summon the moral imagination to understand the degree of responsibility.”

He says the agenda of poverty and the environment must be tied together. This becomes his chorus for the morning. It is the meeting of agendas.

“We don’t have the good news yet but we have the basis for writing it in the future.”

Bono gives good news about debt cancellation, which he was talking about when he first came to Davos. He says new figures from the World Bank and OECD confirm that “there are 29 million children going to school because of debt cancellation in Africa.”

He then talks about AIDS drugs for Africa and fighting down the attitude of officials who said Africans don’t have wristwatches and couldn’t take a complex regimen. But it does work and he says “there are now 2 million Africans on retrovirals and that’s pretty astonishing.”

But then he laments lack of progress on the Millennium Development Goals and G8 goals to bring the lowest countries up the ladder.

“The good news makes the bad news even worse. We’ve proved that aid can be effective…. And yet, the G8 are not making good largely on their commitments. About half, I would say, is where we’ve got…. It looks like we were taken on a dance.”

Gore says the Millennium Development Goals can be met only if the environmental goals are wrapped in because current agricultural goals will work, but with a two-degree rise in temperature, he says, they will fail.

Bono criticizes media and our attention to poverty. “We have noticed that the interest from the media, which has been so accute on the issue of extreme poverty, is not accute now with the climate crisis at home. These people live a long way from us.” If you said that 10 million children were going to die from the environment, he says, it would get aggressive coverage. But 10 million children will die from poverty.

He talks about his relationship with Gore, who has visited his home. He riffs: “Here’s the recycler, Al. I’ve got a posh car but it runs on ethanol, Al… My wife, it’s like living with Al Gore…. He’s sort of rabbinical or like an Irish priest, you meet him in the supermarket and you confess your sins. Father Al, I am not just a noise polluter, I am a diesel sucking… rock star…. I’m trying, Father Al, but to be honest, oil has been very good to me…. Hair gel.”

Gore says it’s important that we move away from the idea that personal action will solve the climate crisis. “In addition to changing the light bulbs, it’s far more important to change the laws…. The one simple thing that will solve the climate crisis is to put a price on carbon.”

Friedman says: “It is far more important to change leaders than light bulbs.” He asks whether “any Democrat will be fine, will put a price on carbon,” or whether “this current economic crisis is coming at exactly the wrong time.” Gore says the three Demcrats “have responsible positions that don’t go far enough. John McCain on the Republican side has a responsible position that doesn’t go far enough.”

Gore says “no change” will be made in the price of carbon “until the people ask for it.”

Friedman later says that environmental movements normally tell governments what not to do but to get a price on carbon, this would require the first popular movement demanding a tax.

Bono says good action comes from popular movements of reform. He also admits that at first, his job was to go to politicians and act as if he had a movement and then wait for that movement to catch up. “It is justice, not charity, that we have always argued.”

Bono says we need a coherent policy on “the three extremes — extreme poverty, extreme climate change, and extreme ideologies.”

“Normally when the world is being reimagined and there’s a new world order — that’s a loaded thing to say around here — it comes after a catastrophe.” He asks that we come to the change before the catastrophe.

Gore praises Bono for getting the presidential candidates to go on the record on the agenda he is pushing..

An aside: “He, by the way, is one of the best politicians I’ve ever run into.”

“I take that as an insult,” says Bono.

“As Groucho Marx said, I resemble that remark.” (Gore never has been the friend of a punch line.)

Indeed, Bono is better at telling his story and making his point. Gore spent too many years trying to get sound bites on TV. For example: “The single thing that reminds us that we are all in this together is the planet.” (to which Friedman nods enthusiastically and seriously, as if this were profound). Gore hits the same points with different words again and again, not knowing which will stick so he keeps throwing. Bono, instead, tells a story.

: Here are Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s impressions.

Condoleeza Rice addresses the opening of Davos. She talks about ideals and optimism and I wasn’t going to blog that; it sounded like boilerplate.

But then she said this: The United States is said not to deal fully with its past. “To which I say good for us. Too much dwelling on history can become a prison.”

That is a bold statement that slaps our enemies. It puts the line not between east and west but between past and future.

She says that America has no permanent enemies. We are engaged in relations with Syria and Vietnam as well as China and she says any talk about a renewed cold war is “hyperbolic nonsense.” She also says that America “has no desire to have a permanent enemy in Iran.”

After the last session on the problems facing the economy and world, a few of us were stunned that terrorism did not even come up. The talk was about markets.

Now Hamid Karzai reminds us of this forgotten priority. He calls it the war on terrorism. “The terrorism we are fighting is an existential force,” he says. “It has nothing to do with religion because if it had anything to do with religion it would not go to kill people in a mosque.” He urges us to eliminate all sanctuaries for terrorism. “The law can only be won if local populations are empowered to confront it.”

Now Rajendra Pachauri, head of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, reminds the group at this official opening ceremony about his issue. It is a stultifying laundry list of their standard talking points. Oh, for some PowerPoint.

I’m in a fairly remarkable session: a huge room filled with hundreds of WEFers around tables to brainstorm economic uncertainty and decide what the problem is (and we should be worried that debating the problem vs. the solution is probably the biggest reason to worry).

The format is working well, bringing out the essential ideas of the smart people (me not included) here. And, again, we perhaps should worry that there are so many ideas about what’s wrong. At my table, I heard fear of the inability and ignorance of decision makers to figure out what’s wrong: kneejer political reactions and the risk of protectionism. I heard that economic models don’t work — as one person said, maybe the $100 bbl of oil we fear is really a $60 bbl, given the fall of the dollar. There was a lot of talk about instant information among customers and debate over the benefit and danger of that. I heard about the unwillingless of companies and governments to acknowledge and manage to the realization that they are part of a global economy and one person blamed the buzzwording of globalization. Problems from other tables: talent; the environment; energy, short-sighted thinking (said one: it’s too late to talk about 2008); a lack of U.S. leadership.

Now we’re asked to vote, with little gadgets, for the single greatest threat: recession, income inequalities, rise in energy and commodity prices, global credit crunch, mismanagement of the current crisis, a collapse of confidence, protectionism, overreaction to the threat of recession, lack of coordinated response and leadership. Winners (if you want to call it that): recession, mismanagement, lack of coordinated response followed closely by lack of confidence. The bottom: greater income inequalities. That will be a controversial choice.

Robert Scoble showed up at Davos with a tie and I was not alone making fun of him. The fashion here is strictly mogul casual.

But peer pressure worked.

Small video cameras are already the hot thing, gadgetwise, at this year’s Davos. Robert Scoble is broadcasting live from his mobile phone, as Jason Calacanis did at DLD. Loic LeMeur is making videos all over for Seesmic (with a bigger camera). I’m playing with the Reuters/Nokia mojo cameraphone (see the videos below). The YouTube Davos Conversation booth is recording the machers on video with tiny cameras.

And I showed my FlipVideo (the $79, 30-minute, dead-easy video camera) to Kai Diekmann, editor of the biggest paper, by far, in Germany: Bild. He gets thousands of photos from his readers, who send it up to a simple number via their mobile phones. Now he’s practicing networked journalism and assigning and mobilizing them to shoot things. He also told me that next week, they’ll have a top chef from a popular German food show telling readers in the paper to send in videos that he will put on his show. Where’s the line among media there? Diekmann is then doing with videos what he did with phones and so he was wowed by the Flip and wants to order a thousand of htem. That’s what happens whenever I show it to open-minded new people: I tell them they should buy them by the dozen and distribute them to their readers to become producers. Here’s Diekmann:

I’m watching a tech panel with the New York Times’ John Markoff moderating Lenovo, HTC, AT&T. Halfway through, he announces it’s off the record. But all sessions in the main buildilng are supposed to be on the record. After much difficulty over what’s on the record and not a few years ago, that’s the simple rule they came up with. I haven’t heard a thing that would shatter the world and I wonder who insisted on this. It’s ridiculous. And that horse is out of the barn anyway. Scoble is in the front row talking about how he broadcasts live on the internet. He could have been broadcasting the whole time. Too bad he wasn’t. That’d be the horse over the horizon.

So I was in the YouTube Davos Conversation area when they brought Henry Kissinger over to record a video. Turns out it was the second time he’d recorded it; the first time, the camera didn’t work and he grumbled about technology. Turns out it didn’t ‘work the second time. But I was there recording the scene with my Reuters mojo camera (a Nokia N82 phone with a very high quality camera). So small technology saves the day. Here’s Henry the K, YouTuber:

At the innovation session, Kigge Hvid, CEO of Index in Denmark, told about the tongue sucker as a new necessity in first-aid kids to avoid blocked airways and suffocation. I asked her to demonstrate for my first Reuters mojo video (taken on a Nokia phone):

I ask the session on innovation (see the post below) for advice: I tell them that I’ve jsut about given up on seeing innovation from the newspaper industry and so I am thinking about getting a grant to start an incubator. I ask the room whether I should and if I should what it should be.

Larry Keeley says that networks outside of newspapers are 700 percent more innovative (yes, he has a way to measure that, which I’ll get). So he suggests creating an award, like the X prize, to motivate innovators. He’s thinking about the Pulitzer of blogs but I’ll disagree with that since I think the Pulitzers skew journalists to do show-off work that’s not often useful; it’s too inward thinking. But an X prize for a company that solves a problem, now that’s interesting.

The theme of this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos is innovation and a good thing that is. Can’t have enough of it.

The first session of the first day is a round-table (actually, a round-room with concentric circles of people facing in, confusing all the panelists at the center and making them dizzy as they talk — an innovation itself, I suppose). It’s about innovation and people at the center begin listing what they think are the best innovations of the last year. A few:

Kigge Hvid of Index in Denmark says that the basic first-aid kit has not been updated since World War I. She then tells us that the great danger for the injured is a blocked airway that robs us of oxygen. So she shows a tongue-sucker invented by students at the Royal College of Arts in the UK after the 7/7 terrorist attack. It’s a simple plastic tube with an orange bulb on the end that grabs the tongue and frees the airway, saving lives while waiting for the pros. A person in the room cautioned that this may complicate the simple instructions given to people in CPR; Keeley adds that sometimes we need “di-innovation,” that is, simplification is innovation.

Larry Keeley of Doblin says the Kindle is an innovation that could matter because if all the newspaper readers in America stopped reading on paper and started reading on epaper, the country would meet all the requirements of the Kyoto agreement. But then he says the design of the device is a failure and if more organizations had embraced the concept, it would have given us a more compelling device.

William McGlashan of TPG Growth talks about a bio company that is now producing fuels.

Kiyoshi Kurokawa, adviser to the prime minister of Japan, praises the iPhone and says there’s nothing new in the gadget; it’s all concept and design. Then he talks about programs that get people to make helping people part of life: Table for Two with contributions going to deal with hunger and One Laptop per Child.

Tom Brown of IDEO praises Walmart’s personal sustainability project and the Open Architecture Network, because both are enriched by the network effect of adding and connecting ideas.

And moderator Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week praises the new video conferencing telepresence systems that let us avoid — my words — innovationless airlines, wasting both energy and time, and empower collaboration.

Nussbam also tells us that a Business Week index of “innovation-driven” companies beats the S&P by 20 percent.

In the audience is Maylasia’s minister of innovation — isn’t that also nicely new — and he asks what government’s role should be. McGlashan says the belief in the U.S. is that government does not invest in innovation, though he says in health that’s not true. (Note that this is an issue for Davos: It ends up becoming America-centric; I’d rather hear new ideas of how Maylasia is doing it.)

A Japanese professor frets about how much a company should hold onto and not make open. Thank goodness Brown gives the obvious examples of the benefits of exploiting open networks, starting with Firefox. Keeley says what’s important to open up is the knowledge archive and the challenge archive — that is, what we need — and this opens the network effect by connecting people with each other and information. He also praises X Prize for giving innovators motivation without hierarchy. The professor then asks what countries should hold onto. Keeley replies that governments, such as Maylasia, must provide the infrastructure for networks and then “get out of the way and trust the talent.”

A member of the audience, Carl Bass, says that the thought years ago was that open source would be innovative but not robust, but as it turned out open source is robust but not very innovative. He acknowledges what he’ll say next is controversial but points out that most of the government-backed innovation in the U.S. comes from defense-funded research.

Another points out that the most important part of openness on the internet is “view source,” for that spreads the knowledge.

Just as the discussion gets good, the format gets in the way and we’re supposed to share our favorite gadgets with each other, one-on-one. Reminds me of hand-shaking time in church. My favorite, by the way, is bandwidth. We are told to mash-up and invent things together. After we hear a few, Brown says that what we should be sharing instead is the challenges for these attempts at invention are frankly banal. But hearing problems is what leads to real innovation. Innovation is a solution.

I’m in Davos.

The WEF’s new mobile sign-up kiosk is utterly hosed this morning as delegates try to sign up — I assume — for Al Gore and Bono.

I’m watching people leave my hotel and their breath is forming complete cumulolimbus clouds.

The hotel room has one electric plug. I was prescient and bought an extension cord in Munich. Talk about expanding the grid. Start here.

I have my mojo kit from Reuters, thanks to Nokia as well: An N82 phone with which I plan to take and post videos. I’ll also be posting to Comment is Free.

Last night for dinner: rösti with ham, mushrooms, and racelette cheese. I’m in a two-week European no-cholesterol-counting zone.

Getting ready for leading two panels tomorrow with an incredible bunch of panelists. One is on internet (over)stimulation; I’ll argue we’re not. Another fascinating topic asks whether the challengers (e.g., bloggers) are still challenging as they join the stream. Panelists at the first session include Lee Bollinger of Columbia.
Panelists at the second include one of Google’s founders, Cisco’s John Chambers, Accel’s Joe Schoendorf.

So off we go. I’ll post as the Swiss power grid allows.