What started out as a simple game of shooting a ball through a hoop has turned into a high-tech juggernaut. The NBA, more than any other professional sports league, has attracted owners from the tech world, built super high-tech stadiums, and adopted big-data analytics and other innovative technology tools to run the business. No team is more representative of this trend than the Sacramento Kings. Like the Golden State Warriors, they are owned by a group of successful technology entrepreneurs. Before the Warriors, they built a state-of-the-art stadium that won Best Elite Sports Facility in the world by the Sports Technology Awards in 2017. Today, the Kings are pioneering global outreach to China, India, Latin America, and beyond to grow the sport of basketball and broaden the NBA's reach around the world.

Brian Sager is a polymath and serial entrepreneur who has taken on fields as varied as biotechnology, clean energy and music. He most recent venture, Omnity, uses machine learning, and is in position to take on the challenge of searching and connecting the rush of data being produced in our digital world. Every day 10,000 new scientific papers are published, just in English, and other fields are also producing data at an extraordinary rate. No human being in any field can possibly keep up with all that new knowledge production. Most authors are aware of less than 1 percent of information related to their topic and yet most innovation comes from connecting up insights across multiple fields. Artificial Intelligence has arrived just in time to augment our human brains and help us master that explosion of knowledge and consequently accelerate innovation in every industry and every field. Sager’s company has harnessed the potential of AI, realizing that “We need to respect the fact that we can’t do everything a c

Brian Sager is a polymath and serial entrepreneur who has taken on fields as varied as biotechnology, clean energy and music. He most recent venture, Omnity, uses machine learning, and is in position to take on the challenge of searching and connecting the rush of data being produced in our digital world. Every day 10,000 new scientific papers are published, just in English, and other fields are also producing data at an extraordinary rate. No human being in any field can possibly keep up with all that new knowledge production. Most authors are aware of less than 1 percent of information related to their topic and yet most innovation comes from connecting up insights across multiple fields. Artificial Intelligence has arrived just in time to augment our human brains and help us master that explosion of knowledge and consequently accelerate innovation in every industry and every field. Sager’s company has harnessed the potential of AI, realizing that “We need to respect the fact that we can’t do everything a computer can do, but we also need to respect the fact that a computer can’t do everything that we can do. We need to combine those together, and that combination I think… it’s becoming more and more obvious to a lot of folks and that is a broad framework of augmented reality, augmented innovation…”

What’s a nice tech investor like Esther Dyson doing in Muskegon, Michigan? Dyson was an early tech guru, impresario of the highly influential conference PC Forum and newsletter Release 1.0, friendly with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. She was a shrewd angel investor and board member of visionary startups, and a pioneer involved in new ventures in the post-Communist developing world. Yet now she’s regularly flying from her base in Manhattan into a handful of small communities in America’s heartland, trying to spread the same message of long-term thinking and learning through trial and error that pervades Silicon Valley (but without the frivolity). The problems she’s addressing have a lot to do with time. At July’s What’s Now: New York event, presented in partnership with Capgemini at their Applied Innovation Exchange, Dyson will lead a conversation about how we need to rethink private and public behavior by shifting from short-term to longer-term horizons.

Ann-Marie Slaughter heads the nearly 20 year old New America – a think tank that considers itself “a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum.” Her wide-ranging and energizing conversation touched on many of the challenges and downsides of the new era of tech as as well as her optimism relating to how communities throughout the US are finding solutions.

What started out as a simple game of shooting a ball through a hoop has turned into a high-tech juggernaut. The NBA, more than any other professional sports league, has attracted owners from the tech world, built super high-tech stadiums, and adopted big-data analytics and other innovative technology tools to run the business. No team is more representative of this trend than the Sacramento Kings. Like the Golden State Warriors, they are owned by a group of successful technology entrepreneurs. Before the Warriors, they built a state-of-the-art stadium that won Best Elite Sports Facility in the world by the Sports Technology Awards in 2017. Today, the Kings are pioneering global outreach to China, India, Latin America, and beyond to grow the sport of basketball and broaden the NBA's reach around the world.

What’s a nice tech investor like Esther Dyson doing in Muskegon, Michigan? Dyson was an early tech guru, impresario of the highly influential conference PC Forum and newsletter Release 1.0, friendly with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. She was a shrewd angel investor and board member of visionary startups, and a pioneer involved in new ventures in the post-Communist developing world. Yet now she’s regularly flying from her base in Manhattan into a handful of small communities in America’s heartland, trying to spread the same message of long-term thinking and learning through trial and error that pervades Silicon Valley (but without the frivolity). The problems she’s addressing have a lot to do with time. At July’s What’s Now: New York event, presented in partnership with Capgemini at their Applied Innovation Exchange, Dyson will lead a conversation about how we need to rethink private and public behavior by shifting from short-term to longer-term horizons.

Fifty years ago the Whole Earth Catalog burst onto the cultural scene and helped set in motion waves of innovation that reverberated through the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of America - and that continue to this day. The one-and-only Stewart Brand was the creative force behind that unique media publication and cultural phenomenon and we’re honored that he’s going to talk about the Whole Earth’s intellectual and entrepreneurial legacy at the June gathering of What’s Now: San Francisco.

Ann-Marie Slaughter heads the nearly 20 year old New America - a think tank that considers itself "a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum." Her wide-ranging and energizing conversation touched on many of the challenges and downsides of the new era of tech as as well as her optimism relating to how communities throughout the US are finding solutions.