I just got an invite from DotSub’s CEO, Michael Smolen to come along with him and Joi Ito to see Larry Lessig’s last speech on Free Culture. Weird, seeing my last post. Of course I’ll put part of it on my Qik channel! By the way, my Qik videos now automatically show up on Seesmic as well. Hopefully YouTube soon. If you’re near Stanford you can come too!

Some more thoughts about photography at Davos — here’s what separates me from the pros (there were a ton of the world’s best photographers at Davos):

1. The pros had better lenses. Some of the lenses they were carrying around were $8,000 each. I only had a single 50 mm lens.
2. The pros got closer. Sometimes only inches closer but often much closer than I could get (especially when we shot Condoleezza Rice).
3. The pros shot more. I sat right next to them and they easily shot 10 times more images.
4. The pros are better at seeing “key moments.” They would anticipate when someone was about to do something interesting and machine-gun the shutter.
5. The pros had editors. I’m sure that of the thousands of images each pro made that their editors only let their very best work hit the media. Me? I posted a lot more than they probably did.
6. The pros didn’t just shoot the main action. One photographer I was watching kept shooting everyone EXCEPT for the person talking. She was getting great reaction shots that were more interesting than mine.

That said, they were jealous of the Nikon D3 I was carrying. They knew it was more sensitive to low light. One pro told me he couldn’t afford to give up his Canon lenses, but if he could he would.

One advantage of putting all my photos into the public domain? People are now uploading them to Wikipedia. Like this entry for AT&T’s CEO. All my photos are in the public domain now. You can use them without even attributing them, or giving me credit (although I do appreciate those of you who give credit for my work). Why do I do that? Because sharing my work with the world has brought me back so much goodness. This is also a gift to the world from Fast Company Magazine, which paid my travel expenses to go to Davos.

Here’s my people photos from Davos (other photos are now up too). Thank you to Nikon for loaning me a brand new D3 camera, which was really awesome. It shoots in 1/4th the light (two stops) than my Canon 5D, which made many of these photos possible. I made all these images using only one lens: a 50 mm F1.4.

0. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr. Without her none of this would be possible. I just uploaded a second photo of her.
1. Pardis Sabeti, biological anthropologist at Harvard University.
2. Robert Crawford, author. He wrote the summaries for the program. This photo is a testament to the low-light capabilities of the Nikon. If you were there you would barely have been able to see Robert because we were in a really dark bar.
3. Neil Kane, CEO of Advanced Diamond Technologies, talks with John Gage, researcher at Sun Microsystems.
4. Benjamin Zander, conductor of Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
5. Feng Jim, CEO of Beijing Hual Information Digital Technology Co. He showed me some incredible devices. I posted a video of him earlier.
6. Reza Jafari, head of the ITU.
7. Tim O’Reilly, head of O’Reilly Publishing.
8. Matthias Lufkens, head of PR for the World Economic Forum, talking with Larry Page, co-founder of Google.
9. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, talking with David Kirkpatrick of Fortune Magazine.
10. Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Interactive.
11. John Markoff, technology journalist for the New York Times (I didn’t recognize him while skiing, naughty Scoble, naughty!).
12. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel.
13. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia (top religious leader).
14. Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes.
15. Yo Yo Ma, famous cellist.
16. Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, world’s largest PR firm, talks with Larry Brilliant, head of Google Foundation.
17. Queen Rania of Jordan talks with Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University. The Queen is the only person that I saw stop a room when she walked in.
18. Lee Bollinger talking with Richard N. Haass, President of Council on Foreign Relations.
19. David Gergen, political commentator.
20. Yossi Vardi, Israeli venture capitalist, talks with Shimon Peres, Israel’s President.
21. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, hangs out with Phillip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs (the folks who bring you Second Life).
22. Pervez Musharraf. President of Pakistan.
23. Congressman Brian Baird (Washington State).
24. Dan Shine, vice president at AMD.
25. Nicholas Negroponte. Head of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, among many other things.
26. Patrick Aebischer. Famous neuroscientist.
27. Larry Brilliant, head of the Google Foundation.
28. Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate. Real honor to meet him.
29. Meghan Asha and Mike Arrington. I got a photo of Meghan giving her editorial opinion of Mike.
30. Gerhard Florin executive at Electronic Arts talks with John Markoff, tech journalist for the New York Times.
31. Alexander Straub, CEO of Truphone.
32. Brenda Musilli. She is Director of Education for Intel and President of the Intel Foundation.
33. Reza Jafari. Head of ITU.
34. William Brody. Head of Johns Hopkins University.
35. J. Vasudev. Founder of Ishafoundation.
36. John Maeda of MIT. Famous graphic designer.
37. Ellen Langer. First female tenured psychology professor at Harvard. I have a second photo of her here.
38. Bob Lessin. Interesting guy, was a vice chairman at Smith Barney before he had a stroke here’s a Fast Company article on him.
39. Bono and Al Gore.
40. Al Gore making a point.
41. Mabel van Oranje (princess of Netherlands) talks with Robert Shriver who runs Bono’s Product Red Initiative and Richard Lovett, head of the Creative Artists Agency (Hollywood’s most powerful talent agent).
42. Michael Spence. Nobel Laureate/Economics.
43. Edmund Phelps, Joseph Stiglitz, Shimon Peres, Elie Wiesel at the “Nobel Nightcap.”
44. Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn.
45. Mitch Kapor. Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation.
46. Don Tapscott. Author of “Wikinomics.”
47. Jonathan Rothberg, genome researcher.
48. Condoleezza Rice. United States Secretary of State.
49. Chad Hurley. Co-founder of YouTube.
50. HTC’s Chairwoman, Cher Wang.
51. William Amelio. Lenovo CEO.
52. Randall Stephenson. AT&T CEO.
53. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, goofs around with Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic.
54. Jeff Jarvis. Famous blogger.
55. Tariq Krim, CEO of Netvibes, talks with Mike Arrington.
56. danah boyd. Social networking researcher.
57. Esther Dyson. Famous technologist and sticker collector.
58. Linda Avey. Founder of 23 and Me.
59. Tim Brown. CEO of IDEO.

Whew, that’s a lot of photos of interesting people for one week.

Engadget alert, this post is just for Ryan Block who runs the killer gadget blog: Engadget. Sometimes I love pretending I work for Engadget and am responsible for traveling the world finding killer gadgets. Hey, a guy has to have some dreams, doesn’t he? 🙂

So, I was riding the train up to one of the closing parties in Davos when Tim Weber of the BBC introduced me to Feng Jun, CEO of Beijing Huaqi Information Digital Technology Company. I recorded the whole thing on my cell phone.

He pulled out of his pocket a book for the Olympics. Ahh, here the Chinese go again being proud of their Olympics, I thought.

But then he pulled out of his other pocket a gadget that he aimed at the book and it started talking about what he aimed at. Then he aimed it at some music and it played the song and he started singing along with it.

Damn, that was cool. How did it work? An infrared film over all the logos, pictures, etc that contained microdots that told the scanner what to play. Cost? $70. I want one just to keep on my coffee table.

But that was just the start. Then he pulled out of his pocket something that looked like a thick business card. Only it had 32 GB of memory on it and the damn thing had a tiny USB connector on it. I want one of those!

Finally he pulled out a digital camera. OK, I was getting bored there. But then he pulled out the SD card and unfolded a little USB connector that was on the SD card. Damn, I want one of those too for my little Nikon pocket camera.

Anyway, I got the whole thing on video. This is definitely a company to watch. The Chinese sure are doing some interesting things.