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The Art Center College of Design in partnership with ESADE Business School is presenting on March 7 in Palau de la Música in Barcelona a global event featuring notable creative leaders and influential media discussing issues of critical importance to society.

The Art Center Global Dialogues: Disruptive Thinking is a series of on-stage conversations with internationally renowned thinkers in many fields whose “disruptive” ideas and actions challenge convention, break current paradigms, and inspire positive changes in the larger world. Unlike traditional conferences, the Art Center Global Dialogues will pair these speakers with influential media figures—including highly regarded editors, publishers, and reporters—in vital exchanges that encourage the development of new ideas.

The Dialogues will focus on four areas particularly relevant to society today:

• Urbanism and architecture
• Communications and media
• Transportation
• Economic and social development

The Art Center Global Dialogues: Disruptive Thinking is open to the public, and will spur a larger dialogue on current and future issues of concern to all of society. The international audience will include scientists, architects, designers, artists, entrepreneurs, institutional and business executives, and all those looking to be a part of this public forum, sharing their experience and questions.

Distinguished international journalist Richard Addis serves as the event’s Guest Program Director and Moderator. An international lineup of radical thinkers and provocateurs, all disruptive thinkers alike, will explore the six influential areas of our daily lives. Moderators and speakers to date include:

• Climate Change: Harry Eyres (columnist, poet, writer, and naturalist) will discuss one of the most powerful disruptive phenomena of our age with such experts as Sara Wheeler (biographer, traveler, and expert on the Artic and Antarctica).

• Geopolitics: Richard Addis (newspaper editor, designer, and writer) will explore whether political ideas provide solutions with Ron Haviv (award-winning photojournalist and co-founder of VII Photo Agency), Bernard Tabaire (Ugandan newspaper editor currently on bail for sedition) and Ram (Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu).

• Business: Lynda Sale (Partner, Sale Owen, marketing consultant, and artist) will discuss with Blaise Agüera y Arcas (software designer at Microsoft Live labs) and others whether business can be redesigned to reflect its deeper reality as one of the most disruptive, free and creative forces of the modern world.

• Science: Robert Matthews (academic, writer, and journalist) will be joined by David Hughes (astronomer, professor, and researcher), David Orrell (systems biologist and mathematician), and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara (theoretical physicist) as they explore how science is running into the ultimate disruption – the unknown – and what new ideas will bridge the gaps in our understanding of life, the Earth and the cosmos.

• Belief: Bigna Pfenninger (founding editor, The Drawbridge, a quarterly literary project) will lead a discussion with Charles Pasternak (academic, scientist, and author) and Joann Fletcher (academic and archeologist) that questions what happens when our deepest beliefs are overturned.

• Design: Stephan Bayley (author, cultural critic, and founder of the Design Museum) will discuss major disruptions that could be on the horizon in architecture, planning and industrial design and how they will improve our lives with Thom Mayne (Pritzker Prize-winning architect, currently building the tallest building in Europe), Peter Head (Director of Arup and head of Planning and Integrated Urbanism) and Chris Lefteri (materials expert and product designer).

Richard Addis and other Dialogues participants have initiated early conversations on a blog developed specifically for the Dialogues (blog.globaldialogues.eu). Those interested in sharing their own perspectives on these critical issues are encouraged to take part in the Dialogues and post their comments on the blog.

The event is limited to 500 seats. You can register to attend the event here.

Art Center College of Design
Since its founding in 1930, Art Center College of Design has been a global leader in art and design education. Located in Pasadena, California, Art Center offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in all visual disciplines, and public programs for all ages and levels of experience. Named the #1 U.S. industrial design school by Design Intelligence, Art Center has exerted a profound impact on society and culture. Art Center alumni hold the top designer positions at BMW, SEAT, Audi, and Nissan, and are internationally prominent in industrial design, communication design, film and photography, and media design as well. With its long-standing service to the United Nations and other nonprofit agencies, Art Center is also the first design school to receive Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) status.

The Art Center-Barcelona Project, initiated at the invitation of the Barcelona and Catalonia governments, revitalizes Art Center’s long-standing European presence and makes Barcelona—with its peerless design history and dynamism—the focal point for a series of highly innovative programs in advanced design education and research. In partnership with the renowned ESADE Business School, the Project will include executive education courses for designers and corporate managers, as well as R&D industry collaborations, postgraduate training, and faculty exchanges. In addition, the Project will produce a series of public forums on the larger role of design and innovation, beginning with the Art Center Global Dialogues in March 2008.

ESADE
Founded in 1958, ESADE is a leader in two areas: the ESADE Business School and the ESADE University Faculties. Ranked the #1 business school by The Wall Street Journal for the past two years, ESADE has campuses in Barcelona, Madrid, and Buenos Aires, and collaborates with over 100 universities and business schools worldwide. Each year, more than 6,000 students participate in ESADE’s Executive Education and MBA programs, as well as undergraduate, postgraduate, and Ph.D. programs in law and business administration. With its network of 28,000 alumni occupying positions of responsibility in enterprises around the globe, and through its historical links with the corporate world and society, ESADE is a lively platform for innovation, debate, and social involvement.

One of the those things you have to live with when you grow a little older in today’s digital era is that one looses the snappy looks one used to have - this happens for everyone in any era obviously, but it gets tougher confronting yourself everyday in that upper left screen corner of the social networks you visit

Luckily there’s Nathan Muntner from Phophoto.com who does magic with his digital pencils vectorizing your pictures whether those are recent or not. Nathan officially launched his site Phophoto.com in May 2007, providing vector-based graphic renderings of photos. Phophoto offers a unique service by transforming photos into digital art and creating a very personalized avatar.

Phophoto distinguishes themselves from the numerous photo manipulation sites that rely on Photoshop, by instead digitally hand drawing and inking the portraits using vector based software resulting in sharp, detailed graphics that are incredibly scalable and perfect for integration with logos, banners, and animations.

Phophoto creates a new captivating image, so the user can stand out from the crowd in the social and business networks, but an image that is still very much them.

Apparently it works since I got several people asking me who did my new buddypic when I uploaded it to Facebook yesterday. If you like what Nathan did to me, try Phophoto.com, currently only $30 for your Manga Caricature or Vector Portrait!

Just got back from holidays (more on that later) and I got tagged again, now by Zach from Symbian in Motion (formerly known as the the Nokia S60 3rd Edition Applications Review blog) with a new meme floating around blogland called “5 Blogs That I Read”. As a starter after holidays and since I really have to pick up my blogging rythm again, here some of my my favorite and regular blog reads, besides the ones you might know from my blogroll. Actually this is a nice ‘n easy way for readers to be introduced to some blogs that you might not have come across otherwise…

The Rules:

• Name five blogs from different countries that you read
• Those five bloggers are tagged with this meme and should participate (if they choose)

The Blogs:

1. Putting people first
2. LIFT lab / think
3. WorldChanging
4. atmaspheric
5. mutant’s musings

Enjoy!

Due to the Host of the Year Award from the Carnival of the Mobilists, I won last week at the Global Peer Awards in Barcelona, Irene Rengel did an interview with me on my work, the mobilists and some predictions in mobile, you can read it here (spanish only): Irene previously did an article on the winners of the Global Peer Awards here and here. It’s great to see traditional media is picking up on our initiatives. Next week I’ll have the chance to talk about mobile evolution in a TV interview for Barcelona TV, in a program called Barcelona Innova.

Today I stumbled upon a nice picture, taken by Danillon, of a presentation I did 2 weeks ago on Mobile 2.0 for the 22@Update Breakfast for 250 ICT professionals of Catalonia, together wiith Carlos Domingo from Telefónica, R&D and Carles Ferreiro from MobileMonday Barcelona.

Just recovering from 3GSM this weekend and slowly starting to sort my emails, impressions and ideas (I voluntarily did not connect to the internet this week), will write a wrap-up soon here. Many people asked if I’d won the Carnival of the Mobilists “Host of the Year” award… Yes, I did! (Russell announced it here). Thanks to all the ones who voted for me, this really means a lot to me!

There is still another Khosla contest running for best “Post of the Year” (best on blogging on mobility related stuff). You can still vote here (password mobilists) for my best post selected for 2006.

m-trends.org is selected by Fierce Wireless readers into the Top 20 Wireless Industry Blogs.

Thanks to all the readers who voted for m-trends.org, I really appreciate your support!

After a month of nominating and voting, Fierce readers picked 20 blogs that certainly represent the crème de la crème in industry coverage. FierceWireless links to most of these blogs on a regular basis and so they deserve the recognition of being a Fierce Favorite. After thousands of votes and a list of nearly 80 blogs, these are the 20 that our readers picked as the best…

Though my personal top 20 looks slightly different, I think the blogs selected are in majority representative of what’s out there. I’m really proud and happy I’m listed next to well known industry blogs like Gizmodo, O’Reilly Emerging Telephony, Engadget Mobile, GigaOM, The Mobile Technology Weblog, TechDirt Wireless, Phonescoop and MocoNews.

It’s great to see that a lot of fellow mobilist bloggers like Russell and Carlo (Mobhappy), Emily (Textually), Ajit with Open Gardens, Justin (MoPocket) and Darla are represented in this selection. You can view the complete list in alphabetical order here.

Some great blogs seem to be missing though, for example where are MobileCrunch and All About Symbian? (btw: now hosting this weeks’s excellent Carnival of the Mobilists #52)

I’ll suppose this will keep me going despite the fact that it’s getting more and more difficult for me to make time available to blog. Many thanks again for all who supported me!

To be honest, I am not really a “top this and that” kind-a-guy, but recently I wandered how popular mobile blogs (bloggers writing about mobile & wireless technology and lifestyle) are in the overall blogosphere. We all know there is a Technorati TOP 100, not that’s it’s completely accurate - here today, gone tomorrow, but I think it gives a good overview based on the number of links people make to a blog, which is ‘a’ measure of popularity of course. I just want you to know that this is not an intend for an official top but rather a personal evaluation I wanted to share with you.

The Technorati top currently is crowded by (now classic) blogs such as EnGadget, Boing Boing, Gizmodo and a lot of blogs reporting on web 2.0, including tech writers such as Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Scobleizer and Om Malik, just to name a few out of all the other great blogs out there.

I was actually surpised finding Smart Mobs just out of the TOP 1.000 (!), which made me think there are a lot of sites inbetween the 100 and the 1.000 that think mobile is not so important to write on, or mobile blogs are maybe just too boring for many readers - apart from the gadget sites, and/or maybe they are just too specialised? Yes, the ‘good old boys’ in the TOP 100 are writing about mobile too once in a while of course and for sure, the mobile lifestyle as we report on regularely isn’t mass market just yet. I can see easily however my dear mobile bloggers collegues becoming more and more popular as mobile will become more important in our day-to-day lifestyle in the near future.

So, here are the popular mobile blog sites, according Technorati.

1. Smart Mobs - rank: 1,033 (4,755 links from 1,081 blogs)
2. textually.org - rank: 1,181 (3,213 links from 1,009 blogs)
3. MobileBurn - rank: 1,868 (5,609 links from 766 blogs)
4. All About Symbian - rank: 2,833 (1,864 links from 589 blogs)
5. MobileCrunch - rank: 3,465 (1,538 links from 508 blogs)
6. MobHappy - rank: 4,920 (1,344 links from 390 blogs)
7. pasta and vinegar - rank: 6,187 (1,145 links from 332 blogs)
8. The Mobile Technology Weblog - rank: 7,928 (2,565 links from 262 blogs)
9. Mopocket rank: N/A (569 links to this URL sorted)
10. Open Gardens - rank: 9,230 (510 links from 232 blogs)
11. Mobile Mentalism - rank: 11,626 (465 links from 189 blogs)
12. Techdirt Wireless - rank: 12,632 (434 links from 175 blogs)
13. Darla Mack - rank: 13,125 (859 links from 169 blogs)
14. Communities Dominate Brands - rank: 13,203 (446 links from 166 blogs)
15. m-trends.org - rank: 17,238 (435 links from 132 blogs)
16. mobile jones - rank: 18,012 (343 links from 127 blogs)
17. The 3G Portal - rank: 18,195 (352 links from 126 blogs)
18. The Pondering Primate - rank: 19,256 (255 links from 120 blogs)
19. gotomobile.com - rank: 22,255 (226 links from 106 blogs)
20. Mobile Opportunity - rank: 23,427 (229 links from 101 blogs)

If you think it makes sence keeping such a top and even extend it, give me a wink and I’ll think to keep this updated every now and then. Please note that this is just my personal check on mobile blogs I’m most familiar with, if I should have left somebody out, please contact me so I can correct if I’m completely missing the ball here.

Note that these figures and ranking are updated nearly daily at Technorati, so if you read this in a couple of days, the numbers will probably have changed.

Note for Justin: you should claim your blog!