Yes NYC!

Yes it was. Shortly berfore Chris Anderson (creating a best-seller book and blog about why best-sellers are selling worse and niche-products will sell better) and Lawrence Lessig (Stanford professor of law and the creative mind behind Creative Commons) about 300 people lined up in front of the New York Public library. Web 2.0 talks seem to be big events here and both speakers made a good show talking about the changes the Internet has on media. Luis Villa has notes about the talk itself so I won’t bore you with details. But it was a good event showing again that American talks tend to be funier and more to the point than Germans.

The talk yesterday was sort the warm up for nextfest today at the Javits Center (thanks Thomas for reminding me). Wired Magazine set up this three day show of futuristics projects in robotics, green technology, games and security. NASA presented tools for the first trip to Mars, Virgin Galactic showed model of its first (and already second) plane comericaly flying into space and there were many neat robots, including cudly seals and a real looking face of Albert Einstein. All in all there was not much that really exited me. I thought the best game was Brainball where two players have to wear brain sensors that control a ball. The person that relaxes best wins. And then there was the BomBot, sort of remote controll car that you can use to put a bomb under a car. Well, of course it was developed for the military but I still didn’t get why they would want to distribute bombs under cars. A bit scary if you think of it…

When I came to nextfest there was just a discussion about green technology going on and the interesting thing for me was to hear how green has become “hip” even for people who don’t care so much about the envirnment. Appartments sell better when they have an eco-friendly rating, hybrid cars are popular and ethanol as a fuel is much talked about. I can imagine that if this trends leads to a change in politics then the US could even become leading in green technology.

So one last night at the hotel and tomorrow afternoon I will pick up Rosy and move into our apartment!