The Davos Question


Every year, global leaders attend the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss how to better the world.

A new twist at this year's WEF is the addition of The Davos Question. There's no branding at the event, but Google is a big backer of the WEF and they've obviously scored a big hit with The Davos Question. It asks everyone, "What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?"

Got an opinion? Post your answer here. A few replies to check out: Bono, Kissenger, Jarvis, Arrington, amongst others.

Michael Arrington describes the YouTube room as the place to be and be seen at this years WEF.

Between sessions this is clearly the place to be. Every few minutes another celebrity or leader walks through to leave a Davos Question response or go to a private meeting in the rooms beyond.

Bono has been by twice. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf came by so many times that people stopped noticing. Rupert Murdoch strolled in, as did Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former PM Tony Blair, Howard Dean, Michael Dell, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Chad Hurley, Henry Kissinger and Shimon Peres.

Three of the panels at the WEF that caught my eye are the The Future of Mobile Technology panel, A Unified Earth Theory and the Google.org session.

The Future of Mobile Technology session was led by Fortune Senior Editor David Kirkpatrick. Panelists included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, SK Telecom CEO Kim Shin-Bae and China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou. Despite having a bit too much of focus on China, it is a good session. Here's a direct link to the English stream. A good review/summary on TechCrunch is here.

Traditionally viewed as separate issues, Bono and Al Gore explored the interrelations between the climate crisis and extreme poverty and solutions common to both. The panel (which wins the award for the shortest title) was called A Unified Earth Theory: Combining Solutions to Extreme Poverty and the Climate Crisis. was chaired by Tom Friedman from the NYTimes.

Google.org held an energy-focused session chaired by Tom Friedman of the NYTimes. Here's the Q&A
that followed the session. Gotta love Friedman who editorializes a bit,
takes a couple shots at Mitt Romney and repeated one of his lines from
an earlier session, "don't change your leaders, change your light
bulbs."

All the sessions are available here and can be streamed online (in English, French or German) or downloaded as podcasts or vidcasts.

Isn't that cool?


Technorati Tags: wef, google, youtube, mobile