Our favorite talks from TNW Conference 2018, listed

TNW Conference 2018 has come and gone and only the glorious memories of brilliant speakers and inspiring talks remain – unless you weren’t there. In that case, we’ve got you too. Those glorious memories and inspiring talks have been immortalized in video and text for perusal at your (b)leisure. There were over 150 speakers, which might be somewhat overwhelming, so we went ahead and picked some of our favorites:

Danielle Woods: Space tech enabling sustainable development

Professor Danielle Woods stepped on the main stage of this year’s conference to talk about how space tech contributes to sustainable future development. This talk gave an overview of some of the space technologies that are already contributing to sustainable development like earth observation, communication, positioning, microgravity research, and space spinoff technology.

During the conference, Woods also answered all kinds of interesting questions about space tech on our very own Answers platform, read them here.

Bryce Bladon: How to solve the problems of the blockchain

Intrigued by the blockchain? Confused by the seemingly endless things that can be put on the blockchain? Bryce Bladon is the co-founder of CryptoKitties, the blockchain game featuring digital cats, that underlines the obstacles blockchain needs to overcome before the technology can realize its potential. Bladon’s talk explored some of the main technical limitations of blockchain — stability, scalability, obsoletion, computational power — and the unique people-created problems that emerge when excitement and ignorance for emerging technology intersect.

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Bladon and co-founder of CryptoKitties, Fabiano Soriani, also did a TNW answers session back in February.

Nir Eyal: Mastering the skill of the century

How do we stay focused when we cannot escape the constantly pinging, beeping and vibrating gadgets around us? Nir Eyal wrote the bestselling book: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which gave insight to the psychology of addictive technology. In this talk, Eyal gave some solid advice on how to master the skill of the century, which is the power to be “indistractable”. This for better managing distractions in business and life, despite ringing and pinging gadgets.

Chris Slowe: How Reddit designs for the internet’s most vocal users

Yesterday, TNW reported that Reddit just surpassed Facebook as the 3rd most visited website in the US. Last week, Chris Slowe, Reddit co-founder, gave a talk at the TNW Conference about how redesigning a minefield-website like Reddit is particularly tricky business and shared some ideas on how to this could be done best.

Connor Swenson: 10x your productivity: Secrets from Google

To stay on the note of productivity in a world where gadgets keep hogging our attention, Google is both the culprit of our addiction and the master on how to beat it. In this talk, Connor Swenson, from the Partnerships team at Google Entrepreneurs provided some insight into how employees at Google stay at their most productive. The secret? Don’t try finding more time, find more energy instead!

Diana Wehmeier: Inspiration towards the future

Dina Wehmeier is the CEO and Creative Director at Plasma magazine, and in her talk, she walked the audience through stories that directly inspired some of the technology we surround ourselves with today. Using examples from the century-old Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon and Hollywood costume designers behind movies such as Batman vs Superman and Captain America, Wehmeier proves that the fiction of today can become the actual technology of tomorrow.