Welcome to the 2005 world technology summit.

One of the quotes I love to say about gathering is, and I've said it before, has to do with a quote that
John Kennedy gave after he decided to have a gathering of living Nobel laureates at the White
House in the '60s. And he announced at the start of the dinner that it was the greatest single gathering
of talent in one place with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone
.

And that's what it feels like here at the summit.

The effort that goes into the process of gathering people here is what the World Technology
Network is all about.

The world technology network is a global Association of the peer nominated, peer elected most
innovative people in science and technology from all over the world.

The process that we go through

is that every year we ask the current members, who are primarily winners and finalists of
previous world technology award cycles in 20 different categories from the obvious IT hardware and software
communications, biotech health, energy materials, space, etc., but also all the related fields that
determine what direction of technology goes and or if it goes anywhere at all like finance and
marketing and policy and law and design and the arts. And we ask the members in all these different fields
from all over the world. A very powerful question.

Who do you think in your field is doing the work of the greatest likely long-term significance? The
ripple effect folks and

People have to think about that. This is not about who is doing the hottest work at the moment in your field although
it often overlaps with that. It's not who is best known. It is not who necessarily is the acknowledged
giant in your field or not. And often it isn't. It's often unknown people. It's whose work do you think
is going to have the ripple effects over the long-term.

We take all those phenomenal suggestions.

And we then we go out and contact those people and organizations.

And we ask them, we don't necessarily tell them unless they ask why they were nominated.
We tell them they were nominated. We ask them what do you think you're doing is particularly innovative and going to
have likely long-term impact and it is often somewhat different from what other people see. We take that
information

put it all together create 20 different judging websites since the members are all over the world and
we go out to all the individual members again and ask them to rank in preference order from amongst
all those nominees who did they think from that incredible pool is doing the best of the best of the
best of the work.

And that leads to a top five typically sometimes a few more in terms of ties. We announce that at
the world technology awards gala ceremony which will be occurring this year at City Hall tomorrow
night. But the awards process was never the reason for the organization. In fact at the time I
remember having internal debates of myself and sometimes heated debates with colleagues about
the fact that the world's definitely did not need another awards program. And in certain degree, I
agree with.

But what I felt was that we needed a collectively, massively collectively,

A.

Subjective.

betting process for the membership.

Asking whose innovative is by definition a subjective thing but by having this massively collective peer
review process I thought that we could arrive at a pretty good approximation of who should be in this global
community and who should we be putting all our effort into introducing and help make
connections and so on.

Now the unofficial purpose of the Organization, unofficial because it's very difficult to pin down by
definition, is encouraging serendipity.

Serendipity are the happy accidents that occur for all of us when you encounter a new idea. A
person that you didn't know before and you didn't think you needed to know

Innovative people take encounters with everything because they have this obsessive focus and passion and
they turn of a lot of encounters for the rest of us at random into serendipitous ones because
they're constantly thinking how do you apply that to their work.

So a network of very, very innovative people are going to have more serendipity by definition. We
just can't pinpoint when and how it's going to happen but we can do things to encourage it. One of the best
things we can do, and this is now the fifth annual gathering, fifth annual World Technology Summit, is to have these
gatherings where we bring people from all these fields at the top of their fields and the expose
them to each other and to expose them to each other's ideas and work.

The,

before I get to the next introduction, I want to do something which, when other people
do it at conferences I think oh they have to do that and to a certain extent you do have to do that, but I also
want to really make clear that if it wasn't for our sponsors and our partners, this whole
process would not be possible.

It costs a huge amount of money to make this all happen. It also takes a huge amount of effort that
we can't do alone without the outreach of these partners. And I really want to thank them
for how you will all benefit over the next couple of days and in the future.


What's going to happen these two days?

We try to have a mix of topics,

approaches to topics, different kinds of speakers, different kinds of sessions because it is extremely
difficult to do something as broad as what we're trying to do in these two days and I know, because it's the fifth time, that
it can be done.

When you have people as diverse working on things as diverse as DNA research in a lab
controlling a rover on Mars to selling software that changes how businesses operate.
When people ask me what's the theme going to be this year the answer is it's very difficult to say.

The theme is encouraging serendipity but if we tried to pin it down to more that's impossible.
Now having said that getting, what we try to do this morning, what we're trying to do this morning we do every year as we have
a series of technology overview key notes from world-class thinkers, doers, leaders in each of
the six major technology areas. IT, communication technology, biotech and health, materials,
nano tech, energy and space.

And those people will give you, by definition, a very encapsulated it summary version of what's imminent
important possible in those fields because by definition given the betting mechanism everyone who's here

is probably a world-class expert in one of those fields. Everyone of you. And probably knows not
as much as you probably could in some of the other fields. So by this morning by giving all of
you a pretty darn good education in a short period time of some of the key major things
going on in each of these fields.

More serendipity can happen. More of you are more likely to see the applicability of someone not
necessarily in your field or on the edge of your field that you encounter here in the break outs
.

In just general networking, in general conversation.

One of the things we're during this year also to current serendipity is each of you when you registered were given a
randomly assigned truly randomly assigned name of another delegate and your goal by lunchtime
tomorrow, on Tuesday, is to have met that person sought them out, met them, find out some way
that you could help the. It might be a stretch and it might not be guaranteed that you could help but, you know, saying I
know so and so I could introduce you to or have you read this book or I have a project that we could
collaborate on that could solve that problem for you. Something to help achieve their goals. And we're going to be looking
through all of those and the benefit will just be in the process to you anyway but we're going to select our favorite one and
then make a donation to the charity of your choice for the favorite one, just as a way to underscore the serendipity
process.

I'd now like to hand things over to Adam Lachinsky who's going to be running these extraordinary
morning sessions. Adam deserves special thanks, not only for running these morning sessions today
but also having done so last year and on so on such a great manner. Adam is the senior writer
covering a high-tech and finance for Fortune magazine and let's give him a big round of
applause Clapping