(((Now that's some world-class blogging there. Wow.)))
Link: Edge 202.
John McCain was on the closing panel and made one very important point…that Congress would pass a strong climate change bill and that Bush would sign it. You can imagine that was well received especially coming from him. I must say he did not look well and wondered if he was up to the rigors of a Presidential campaign.
Davos for me ended with an event that I always look forward to, The Nerds Dinner.
On Saturday evening the World Economic Forum holds a blacktie gala in the Kongress Hotel and it is a real drag. Imagine over 4000 people jammed in face to face in penguin suits and gowns, with men smoking cigars, drinking bad wine, fighting to get access to tables filled with bad food, irrelevant music blaring in the background with everyone shouting at the person next to them so that they can be heard…a nightmare to be avoided.
And, oh by the way, the really cool people…CEOs, heads of state and major celebrities are not in the hall. They are having elegant private dinners.
Well,about fifteen years ago Paul Saffo organized a dinner for the Silicon Valley types who weren't cool enough yet and definitely did not want to be in the hall, which came to be known as the Nerds dinner. Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners has really become the sponsor, organizer and provider of the really great wines. Orville Schell always does a brilliant and hilarious poem about the participants and there are truly hysterical moments.
So first of all who was there…a partial guest list: The head of NIMH, Rob Socolow of Princeton, the founders of Facebook, Steve Chu of Berkeley (Noble in physics), Yossi Vardi, Israel's top VC and funniest, the founders of Flickr and Skype, Senator Maria Cantwell, John Markoff of the NYT, Orville Schell, Shai Agassi of SAP, Peter Gabriel, Larry Brilliant and wife, the women's world champion Kenyan marathoner, Lord Martin Rees, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mitch Kapor and probably some others I've missed.
((((etc etc etc etc good lord etc etc)))
