Chris Anderson, editor of “Wired” and author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, explains the concept of “The Long Tail” (a term he coined and is now widely used).

He talks about the “power law” and “scarcity effect” and the “long tail” economy that is taking place in business today.

Eva Vertes poses some interesting questions about cancer. Could it be that cancer is the body own immune system go awry and unable to complete the process?

Daniel Gilbert, author of the book Stumbling on Happiness, claims that the “impact bais” causes people to over-estimate the amount that events will affect people’s happiness. Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard University. He suggests that “synthetic happiness” is just as good as “authentic happiness”.

Luis von Ahn, assistant Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, starts the talk explaining captcha. This is an example of an application where computer can not solve it very well but humans can. He then goes on to explain other problems where humans can solve things much better than computers can currently. The idea is to harness the “human cycles” and use them to solve computer applications by making a “game” out of it.

Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google, did a talk in Paris on June 19, 2007. She explains the four components of searches: comprehesiveness, relevance, speed, and user experiences. You will see slides of the evolution of the Google home page. She talks about the future of searches, universal search, and personalized search. She then answers audience questions.

Watch the video at PodTech.net

Ely Greenfield, architect of Abode Flex, presents an overview of the Flash and Flex architecture on a whiteboard.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, talks about technology trends at TED.

Steve Souders of Yahoo explains how to make web pages faster by front-end optimizations.