emerging tech, foldable cars, a stage invasion but a disappointing lack of fist-fights

Yesterday I attended the emtech China conference - an MIT sponsored event focusing on emerging technologies in a Chinese context. Highly organized and featuring some high profile speakers (incl. the CEO of RenRen, GM of Zynga and a senior Microsoft Asia technology strategy bod), it was well worth the diminutive ticket price, particularly considering the ample provision of cava and victuals. Several glasses of the former indeed induced enough dutch courage for me to storm the stage at the end of the evening and demand a round of applause for my friend and fellow member of Team Banter Lilly Kam, but the less said about that the better...

In any case, putting aside my outrage that anyone claiming to be an expert should pass off as wisdom something so banal and self-evident as 'there is no silver bullet in the energy portfolio', which mindless repetition is probably a lamented feature of most every conference, I was broadly impressed with the contributions of the speakers and panelists, particularly Ryan Chin (whose pitch for his foldable City Car concept was one of those shiny and optimistic visions of the future that is always fun to witness). In brief, each wheel has independent steering and its own drive motor enabling the car to turn on a dime, and passengers exit through the front windshield of the vehicle so it can be parked facing the pavement. Chin suggested that like the city bike concept, you could simply rent these vehicles for your journey rather than own them outright, though my recent experience of the extremely buggy Barclays cycle hire scheme in London was less than satisfactory and the problem of low density/high density locations (everyone wants to enter the city in the morning, leave it at night) remains an issue. My answer to that problem, incidentally, is to introduce market pricing that would incentivize the unemployed or students to drive vehicles from high density to low density locations to achieve equilibrium. 

We were less taken with his vision extended to Fifth Element swiss-army-knife apartments which reconfigured themselves from bedroom to gym to office to nightclub throughout the day to meet your needs in the smallest space possible. I think there are two things wrong with this idea. a) the human mind needs a transition space between operating in different spheres - a short walk, commute etc. gets your brain from sleepy mode into workout mode into work mode - indeed there is a great recent piece of research on the role that doorways in this process. A yet more convincing objection was raised by Danish cultural ambassador Jorgen Munk: b) what if your apartment computer contracted a bug and lost control, squishing you in between expanding and contracting walls, or worse still became stuck on 'nightclub mode' permanently - a sort of nightmarish perma-Vics.

If I had one more complaint (which I often do), it would be that panelists were far too polite to each other. I am sure that Lilly and her fellow conference organized hoped that putting the coal advocate CEO of Amina LP and a bunch of clean energy evangelists (a gross simplification of their many and various accomplishments) on the stage together would lead to at least a brief fist-fight, but they all remained cool, calm and civilized. I have the same problem hosting the Beijing Banter podcast, which is why I provide ample quantities of booze and try to get Gil and Jorgen riled up as often as possible.

All in all though, good clean fun (so to speak). I'll follow this up with another post soon detailing Technology Review editor Jason Pontin's list of 2011's top 10 emerging technology stories.