I was lucky to be part of the DLD 2011 conference. DLD (Digital-Life-Design) is an annual gathering of leading figures in technology, science, business and culture. I showed work on touchscreens, VJ-ed at the party, and observed.

Flying business class is nice, staying at a 5-star hotel is even nicer. The skylight pool was the best.

There is a lot of money in tech.
I overheard a conversation between 2 investors: “Thanks for that tip, you saved me 40 million.”

30 year old CEO Andrew Mason spoke about turning down Google’s 6 billion dollar offer for Groupon.com. Computing power is very cheap nowadays so startups can scale easily. I wonder if the same will happen to engineering. In the near future, creating a web service could be as easy as sending an email.

A presentation on space tourism; tickets range from 200K (suborbital flight) to 150 million (flight around the moon). “It might seem hard to believe but for some people 200,000 USD is not within their means, we’re working on cutting the prices even further.”

Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook, Spotify) spoke about The Social Network: “It’s a great movie but also a complete work of fiction.” Later that night I saw him in the hotel elevator, drunk with 2 hot girls in his arms, looked like the movie to me.

Wellness expert Deepak Chopra spoke about spiritual wealth: “Truly rich people don’t spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”

Poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger spoke about the term cloud computing: “It is in interesting choice… most IT words are very dull. Clouds stimulate the imagination. However, clouds are very unpredictable, you should not be surprised if they leak and it starts to rain.”

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt (photo above) spoke about self-driving cars and realtime voice translation. Our present is very futuristic. Geeks rule the world and the future looks even nerdier. “Your kids are either asleep or online.” I wonder how long it takes till we let Google into our dreams.