I’m sitting in the audience on this day 2 of PC Forum. Lots of people are blogging it, so I’m only blogging what I find remarkable.
Yesterday, we heard from Andrew Stern, the president of the the Service Employees International Union, who is most certainly an unusual speaker for a capitalist conference such as PC Forum. But it was highly interesting, because it was an incredible re-interpretation of what "union" means. If unions have a future in this 21st century, Andrew Stern is the guy to watch.
This morning, Jeff Hawkins was talking about his work on understanding the brain. What he says makes a lot of sense to me: the brain is a big memory system, not a computer, and it matches and predicts. I did not know that the brain is actually organized hierarchically on a neural level. But what I wonder about most is how the brain research establishment take it that an entrepreneur of Palms, of all things, essentially takes over and revolutionizes the field.
It’s amazing how different, in presentation skills, the entrepreneurs are who are pitching their companies. As are the seasoned executives on the various panels. The best speaker, in rhetoric terms, so far is clearly Andrew Stern (not counting Esther herself who is moderating rather than speaking, mostly).