By Tim O'Reilly
However, the Wall Street Journal is doing a great job of covering the World Economic Forum on their blog, The Daily Davos. (I don't know how they do it. I certainly don't have time.) Here are a couple of their posts:
- Soros: Free for All Fallout Requires Finance Sheriff. Legendary financier George Soros (who I'm looking forward to meeting in a few minutes at a philanthropic roundtable) suggests that we need "a massive injection of regulation and oversight over financial markets, saying that the lack of restraints on the markets has caused 'not a normal crisis but the end of an era.'"
- From the Cola Wars to the Clean Water Wars. A lot of big company CEOs are starting to recognize that clean water is one of the scarce resources that we've long been wasting, and that it's coming time to pay the piper. There have been a number of sessions on that theme here. It's one that's been on my radar for years, ever since I read Cadillac Desert years ago, and then saw an interview with Ted Turner in which he said that if he were a young man he'd be investing in water. Seems like his insight is starting to be more widely recognized.
- Ideas that take flight at Davos covers former SAP wunderkind Shai Agassi's new venture in electric cars.
They haven't yet covered the keynote discussion between Bono and Al Gore this morning about how to reconcile the issues of fighting global poverty with fighting global warming, but I'm sure that will be up soon. Good stuff.
The conference itself is rather overwhelming, with dozens of concurrent sessions spread across town. It's tough enough at a regular conference to get to everything you want, but it's even tougher when sessions can be twenty minutes apart. There's great stuff here, but sometimes a little hard to get to. But it's kind of cool to brush past Henry Kissinger or Hamid Karzai in the halls. I'll try to cover some of the sessions I attended when I get back and have some spare time.
