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The Jack Klaff session had some weird vibes: laughing one minute, getting completely thrown off the scent the next and ending with a chilling finale. Klaft is a South African born Princeton professor/actor who was also involved in the Starlab initiative (as is Serguei by the way) in Brussels. I'm not sure I know what he talked about in the end ... but he got us sitting on the tip of our chairs.

He was followed by John Engel, production manager in the movie business and author of Uncommon Sound, a history of the guitar since the 1920's with a focus on all those ground-breaking left-handed guitar players like himself. He introduced us to another lefthanded guitar player, Djamel Laroussi, Algerian-French, who produced some trancelike sounds from his guitar (with the strings upside down) and who got the audience joining him in clapping and singing ... sort of, anyway.

I missed the last part, so I didn't get to see Catherine Verfaillie (which is a pitty), nor R.U.Sirius (behind the 10Zenmonkeys blog) nor Noam Perski (who, I read on Twitter made this equation: all datacenters in the world have an energy consumption of 2% which is more than the aviation industry worldwide) , Calligrafitti (who probably designed the awfull TEDx t-shirts) or Paul Collier. And I don't know either whether the missing speakers (Pedro Brugada, the heart surgeon? Caroline Gabriel? ) eventually showed up.

I wouldn't call it Burn the Box, and I do realize that when we think TED, we think TED.com and all those really really great guests they seem to have an endless stock of. It was certainly worth the trip, however. And absolutely to be repeated next year, with more possibilities for interaction (tweets on a screen for example and have speakers react to them if they want to)

I haven't figured out what the incentive was for those like me who paid double the amount of the 50€ fee ... and I haven't found any information yet on the TEDxBrussels website (movies, slideshows, ..) so I'm guessing it will come, eventually.

I hope.

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Yesterday's TEDxBrussels event 'Burn The Box' in the European Parliament left me with mixed feelings. It was fun to listen to hear Michel Bauwens (an old university buddy) starting about his bad Karma day. First a trip from hell from Thailand where he lives followed by his laptop disappearing. It wasn't so much the laptop he was worried about he told me during the break but the reaction of his wife on hearing about it ... We listened to Negroponte rooting for his 'one laptop per Child project' and to Karel De Gucht being interviewed (again) too long about Van Rompoy and too short about what was really important (aid to developing countries).

It got really interesting when Dambissa Moyo talked about Dead Aid and did that splendidly, seated in one of the easy chairs, no need for cues or paper notes. Marc Van Montagu surprised by being as emotional as ever when talking CGO's and about all those great ideas that could fairly simply help developing countries grow their own food.

Really disappointing was Clayton Schaeffer. Not a gifted speaker, reading notes: undoubtedly the subject was very relevant but I don't think anyone understood what it was all about ... something to do with landtitles, microfinancing, registries, rights of the poor, help get rid of charity (the 9 trillion dollar question in the title being the overall worth of all assets of the poor).

David McCandless entertained the crowd with a great exposé on the largescale information overflow and how to manage it. His theory: use our ability to visualize data to help us with that. A very interesting and practical view of the visualization of abstract data, in order to detect trends, and make the data more readily available to anyone.

The notion of “awareness” is based on some key factors: our vision, our taste, our sight, … The combination of these allows us to combine those senses into something we are “aware of“. He illustrated it with some real cool graphs that, indeed, say it all. One of them I distinctly remember having seen somewhere before is posted here. But maps like the Map of the Internet are typical for the stuff he talks about.

But all in all: no Burn The Box stuff, not really inspiring, no wow ... yet.