Here are some photos from the event. Arianna was most gracious in person.

Before the event, she told ValleyZen that Huffington Post is beginning a new arts section and invited Drue to be a contributor. During the event, ValleyZen asked her about her book “Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend.” Arianna wrote this book when she was just 30 years old and interviewed nearly every living person who knew Callas.

We will post the entire video of the event later. So check back if you’d like to see it.

Arianna tells Drue about the new arts section of the HuffPo

Churchill Club CEO Karen Tucker and Forbes’ Richard Karlgaard

Svetlozar Kazanjiev and Arianna Huffington

Arianna and Karen

Arianna and Richard keeping the audience on the edge of their seats

On Dec 12th, TEDx Silicon Valley brought together several hundred leading thinkers and doers to talk about Innovations for Social Change. A great lineup included Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Peter Thiel (Clarium Capital/Founders Fund), Thomas Goetz (Wired Magazine), Dr. Clayborne Carson (Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University) and many more. I was fortunate to be a speaker as well, and my talk included a musical performance and slides of my art. More on this coming soon in another post.

Some cool facts about our TEDx:
• More than 100,000 individuals watched the UStream video and participated online live.
• More than 45 countries around the world participated in the TEDx Silicon Valley UStream and Twitter channels.
• Over 11.8 million TEDx SV social media impressions throughout the world happened.

The leadership team creating TEDx Silicon Valley was fantastic. ValleyZen would like to give them a shout out here:

Co-Curators Ron Gutman (CEO of Wellsphere) and Andrej Naberoj (Co-Founder of Noovo) worked together to assemble an amazing, diverse team:

Lorenzo Thione (Founder, Powerset) brought his unique knowledge of technology and artistry to the production. He also made the final show run seamlessly, blending, audio, video and live streaming.

Rachel Masters (former VP of Strategic Relationships at Ning, Inc.) brought her serious media and social media expertise.

Dr. Daniel Kraft (Stanford faculty, Founder, StemCor Systems, and TED speaker) brought an irrepressible love and knowledge for all things TED and sought out Campbell Recital Hall as a beautiful venue for the talks. Daniel also chronicled the day in some wonderful photographs which can be seen here.

Greg Miller (Managing Director at Google.org ) brought his devotion to TED values and inexhaustible TED knowledge. He made excellent speaker recommendations including to feature Daniel Berkman, the African kora player.

Silvia Console Battilana (Founder, Auctionomics) brought her brilliant organizational mind and tremendous energy to the cause. Also a strong advocate for women’s voices and causes.

Gary A Bolles (CEO of Xigi Inc) brought his depth of experience on conferences and passion for TED. He was most definitely the logistics guru—anticipating and resolving any glitch before it could materialize.

Robin Starbuck Farmanfamaian (San Francisco Ballet ENCORE! President) brought her boundless positive energy to TEDx. She organized and deployed an army of 45 incredible volunteers.

Chris McCann (Founder of the Startup Digest with BASES) was a social media machine, coordinating social media initatives for TEDxSV.

Jen McCabe (CEO/Founder of Contagion Health) was also a social media firestorm, who came up with fresh ideas for how to communicate with the TEDxSV audience.

Mona Brooks (Mona Brooks photography) was the official photographer of TEDx SV capturing the beauty and energy of the day with aplomb.

Veronica Ho (Wellsphere) brought her great attention to detail to the production — assisting Ron with many important elements of the conference.

Kathleen Donahue (Wellsphere) was the graphic designer par excellence helping make all slides uniform and working hard on the program.

Rocky Mullin (Founder, Vanadium) was our stage manager extraordinaire.

Jennifer Barr (Social Entrepreneur) brought an amazing amount of volunteer experience and a true passion for social entrepreneurship.

Dr. Michelle Kraus (political blogging) brought her wisdom and passion.

Ivan Marchenko did beautiful work on the site.

Also for all those who volunteered and contributed a lot of their time in the final week and day of — thank you.

PLEASE SHARE a FAVORITE MEMORY or TWO of TEDx Silicon Valley here:

“We used to have a manager and we got rid of them. We use to have a PR person and we got rid of them. We used to have a [inaudible] and we got rid of them,” Moonalice guitarist Roger McNamee (aka Chubby Wombat) said on stage to the enthusiastic crowd below at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

Sound serious? Sure — the art of subtraction is not an easy one.

McNamee continued “So we turned it all over to Facebook and Twitter and have shared thousands of downloads with you. Thank you for supporting us as we give away this music — and — we won’t be
undersold!”

Just got back from the concert. The experience of listening to Moonalice while also conversing with them and their fans all live, via twitter, was pretty cool. On the drive home, it hit me how interesting it was that Moonalice has subtracted so much from the infrastructure traditionally wrapped around a band or any entertainment entity. Not everyone can do this. But Team Moonalice has done it successfully because they feel that music is a collective experience. It’s clear that they place value on each voice in their audience/community. Leveraging the latest social media technology of today, Moonalice embodies the communal, open and collaborative values of the 60s, which gave birth to the music that they now carry into the future.

With over 85,000 Twitter followers, the music’s devoted audience/community makes a statement that you don’t need to be Miley Cyrus, or to have a PR agent, to have a massive following. This year they were also the first band in HISTORY to live twitter a concert –Immediately following each song during a show, Moonalice’s sound team takes the song, digitizes it, uploads it, and tweets it—all before finishing the next song. Broadcasting a concert in real-time on the Twitter platform? Cool!

What’s their secret? Not only does Moonalice have great listening skills on stage. They also have great listening skills in the twittersphere — paying close attention to their fans and taking the pulse of the community that supports them.

Our Takeaways?
Out: manager, publicist and [inaudible].
In: Twitter and social media. “Moonalice legend has it” that you can subtract the inessential from your business or life as well

Moonalice lighting up the marquee of the historic Great American Music Hall.

Drue taking in the ambience before the concert

Svetlozar had a blast.

Chubby Wombat Moonalice (Roger McNamee) on bass guitar and vocals and Blue Moonalice (Ann McNamee) – bass, keyboards, percussion, vocals?

As a child, I was enthralled with the works of James Burke. Like the enso, the tales he told had no beginning or end. His work simply explored the “connectedness” of things, both past and present.

I was reminded of James Burke while attending the recent ICANN gTLD & IDN Outreach event in Hong Kong (videos of all of the sessions and materials are available here online).

What reminded me of James Burke while attending the event was the combination of ICANN’s new gTLD initiative with the IDN initiative. One of the few restrictions on new gTLDs is that the gTLD cannot consist solely of numbers. This is to avoid the obvious conflict with IP addresses. However, during the media lunch, I spoke to Doug Brent, the COO of ICANN and Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia and one of the developers of the underlying technology that makes IDNs possible, about the feasibility of having a purely numberic gTLD in another language, like Chinese, that does not use Hindu-Arabic numerals.

This fascination with lucky numbers is so intense that people have been known in Hong Kong to pay outrageous amounts for license plates with lucky number combinations. Recently, in February, someone paid about US$220,000 for a plate with the numbers 2318, which sound like “easy life and prosperity” in Cantonese. The date and time for the commencement of the recent Beijing Summer Olympics (8/8/08 at 8 seconds and 8 minutes past 8 pm) was not an accident. Triple eights and the number 8 in general are considered very lucky in Chinese culture.

So when I sat down with Doug and Edmon, I asked this question about numeric gTLDs because I wanted to see if it was possible for someone to leverage this Asian fascination with lucky number combinations to register a new gTLD that would otherwise escape the notice of western applications focused on new gTLDs like . film, .movie, etc.

I wanted to know if someone could apply for a gTLD like

The answer I received from both was “yes” (with the usual caveats). And their answers got me thinking.

Aside from puns, another source that influences whether a number is considered lucky or not is the I Ching. For example, the 8 trigrams of the I Ching play a role in the number’s popularity and the numbered trigrams themselves have lucky or unlucky connotations (as do the total number of hexagrams (64)). The I Ching’s influence throughout Asia and the rest of the world is, and has been, considerable. The modern South Korean flag bears 4 hexagrams from the I Ching:

Furthermore, the I Ching had a profound impact on Zen monks in Japan and had a profound impact on Tokugawa Japan and Zen thought in Japan at the time.

Perhaps one of the most relevant influences of the I Ching to our discussion is the impact it had on the work of Franz Leibniz and his work on philosophical mathematics and his characteristica universalisa. The Jesuit, Father Joachim Bouvet, brought the I Ching to Leibniz’s attention in 1698, and Leibniz concluded from his studies of the I Ching and the work of Shao Yung, a Song Dynasty philosopher who is credited with contributing to the binary nature of the I Ching, that Chinese characters may have been an early form of his characteristica universalisa and he noted the binary nature of the I Ching hexagrams and wrote about them extensively in his article, Explication de l’Arithmétique Binaire that was published in 1703.

Leibniz’s work on binary language and his philosophical mathematics led to ideas and breakthroughs that have led him to be called the first computer scientist. In 1679, his work on binary mathematics led him to conceptualize a machine that would use pellets and be controlled by punched cards. He made many other significant contributions that influenced other thinkers after him that would make their own contributions to modern science. Leibniz’s work, and the influence of the I Ching, the Chinese language and thought on his work, laid the groundwork for science that underlies the modern computer revolution and the Internet. So perhaps it is fitting that there is Unicode support for the I Ching hexagrams.

More importantly, it seems somehow appropriate that more than 300 years after the Chinese language and the I Ching influenced one of the founding fathers of the computer revolution, it will soon be possible to have a lucky number sequence in Chinese as a top-level domain….

Post by Henry Oh, co-founder of Socialutions, Inc., WikiEnterprise, COW.com and the Hong Kong Startup Association. He is also the Secretary for the Cyberport Creative MicroFund (CCMF) and is managing the operation of that unique pilot program that is utilizing WikiEnterprise to help startup entrepreneurs by giving grants to startups developing technology or products that utilize opensource, Creative Commons or have some social entrepreneurship element. Henry holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a M.Sc. in Media and Communications Regulation and Policy from the London School of Economics, a B.A. from UCLA and was the recipient of a Fulbright grant. Henry has studied the Internet since 1993, with a focus on privacy, free speech and open source technologies.

This season, Malandrino got inspiration from diverse cultural identities around the world. Through different tableaux, her collection spanned the Saharan, Peruvian, Polynesian and Sudanese. In Catherine’s own words, “The silhouette is based upon draping and wrapping…Scarification of the leather reflects a native expression.”

Check out ValleyZen’s photo essay on Catherine Malandrino’s Spring/Summer 2010 collection—scroll all the way down below….

The Diva herself Mary J Blige, Catherine Malandrino and Drue (wearing Catherine Malandrino). We had a soulful conversation.

Backstage Paparazzi!

Model Shanina backstage wearing chianti one shoulder asymetrical draped jumpsuit and Drue in Malandrino chianti knit dress with flower detail. ValleyZen approves of assymetry!

In Catherine Malandrino’s Sudanese presentation, the noir pierced bubble crochet bolero with ivory baba pant and the condo leather raglan jacket caught our eye. A very austere and sensual look for the modern woman.

Drue talks with Catherine Malandrino’s husband and CEO Bernard Aidan

Drue with Supermodel Tyson Beckford, Host of Bravo’s “Make Me a Supermodel” on his motorcycle

We caught up with Catherine backstage before the show. Moving quickly, she was a vision of elegance, in draped noir off the shoulder and platformed shoes. Without question, one of the most attractive designers in the industry– she truly understands modern femininity.

Always personable and insightful, Bernard Aiden has been a major force behind the rise of the Catherine Malandrino brand

Teen.com’s Kimmy Ratican talks with Drue backstage.

Drue with model Danni Li in foglia chiffon ruffled draped asymmetrical dress

Beria cutout trapuata bolero and zambia side jumpsuit filled the white, high-ceiling halls of Chelsea Art Museum with dark energy, and stunned

Hair was beautifully braided for the Peruvian looks, establishing subtle dialogues with the alluring, vortex-like patterns of the fabrics

Drue and the Peruvian tableaux

Machu picchu chiffon dress, terra cotta pierced treccia fringe dress and cuzco top were some highlights here. More dynamic and playful, we thought, compared to the elegant silence of the Sudanese tableaux.

Polynesian tableaux: baddulla flower dress in nu and lapis, mukdahan pleated drape dress, surin flower swaroski crystal headbands… Light, airy, sylphide-like lines capture the spirit of spring and early summer.

Walking downstairs from Backstage (which was upstairs). Interesting view from the stairs

Last few minutes backstage

Tyson Beckford, Catherine Malandrino, Mary J Blige, Keisha Whitaker and Estelle. The place was Happening!

Keisha Whitaker is red-carpet ready even in jeans. I like how she breathes into a pose. Celebrity Stylist and E!, Oprah and Entertainment Tonight correspondent Phillip Bloch was chic in his vest.

A moment of male solidarity: Aboomba CEO Svetlozar Kazanjiev with Catherine Malandrino CEO Bernard Aidan. What is it like living with artists?

Millionaire Fashion lover and NBA Superfan James Goldstein. Friend to Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Diddy and George Clooney among others. He invited us to his iconic, fabulous house in Los Angeles. It is one of the most photographed homes in the world. Love his style: he wears Galliano with a vibe!

Svetlozar in Ralph Lauren and Dior

Drue with Oscar Aidan

Svetlozar and the Malandrino neon

Mary J Blige is a beautifully expressive woman. She has also recently started FFawn — Foundation for the Advancement of Women.

After the show, Svetlozar and I were leaving. Bernard was calling to us. He was around the corner in the Malandrino limousine with Alexia and Oscar. We shot a video clip on the spot. He invited us for lunch with Catherine & him.

Downtime after an intense and fabulous show. Hiding from the paparazzi. Bernard, Catherine, Alexia and Oscar.

Drue & Svetlozar and Bernard & Catherine with the kids. Oscar loves funny faces. Bernard orders two chocolate sundaes to share.

All Access Pass in CM black and yellow colors

Alexia Aidan’s boyfriend Alan Philips chats with Drue at the afterparty

Unit & Guest Naoko Nose from Tokyo

Terence Lyon and Castle Oak chillin– Wall Street represents!

Alexia Aidan rocks noir

Drue in Catherine Malandrino multi-color chiffon sleeve dress

fashion week elevators

Svetlozar at Barney Greengrass, a century old NY tradition– hey they can even deliver overnight to the Hamptons– or Silicon Valley.

Incognito with salmon.

The Zen of Free

Before the internet, one could say (in general) that a good was either “free” or “not free.” However, today the meaning of FREE has been forever transformed by the internet and is constantly evolving. Online, a good is not purely “free” or “not free.” It can be both. This reminded us of the Zen concept of “not one” and “not two,” where “not two” negates a dividing of the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, and “not one” refers to non-dualism. Movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s third perspective. This third perspective is harder to define, but more in keeping with today’s “free” and what “free” will become in the future.

The Speakers

Gina Bianchini, CEO at Ning (offers platform where users have created 1.3M social networks with 28M registered users); Joe Kennedy, CEO and President of Pandora; Ranjith Kumaran, Founder and CTO of YouSendIt; Joe Sipher, Co-Founder and CTO of Pinger; and Neil Young, CEO of Ngcomo, spent the next hour+ providing a variety of views of Free as a marketing method for monetizing digital products and services. Some of them have succeeded in monetizing their companies’ offerings, while others are still trying to figure it out. All agreed that advertising revenues are unlikely to sustain a bit offering– unless it can deliver many millions of eyeballs to potential advertisers.

Free is Cheaper to Market

Perhaps because most, if not all, panel members have grown up in a digital world, the panel did not discuss obstacles and other significant costs in creating a market for high tech products made of atoms (as opposed to bits). In a physical world, manufacturers of innovative consumer products and services made of atoms would spend years of effort and lots of money to educate high-end consumers about the merits of their products and how to use them. They would also spend heavily on creating distribution channels to educate, train and assist retail outlets, so they could do the pre-sale consumer education and training as well as post-sale servicing.

In the early days of high tech, there were no retail outlets capable of providing pre- and post-sale services for such products. When hi-fidelity stereo products were first offered to the general public, there were no high tech consumers other than a few thousand engineering types. While a music fan could recognize the differences between low-fi and high-fi sounds, they were completely baffled by all the knobs, switches and interconnections required to create a music system out of components. Regarding distribution, expensive trials using drug, furniture and television retail outlets failed miserably. Few sales clerks or service personnel in appliance or other retail stores could do anything more than turn on the power. The same was true for personal computer hardware and software. Fortunately for personal computers, the channels that had been created for hi-fi products could serve as their initial distribution channels, retail outlets and service organizations. Advertising’s primary economic function in an atoms economy is to educate a potential consumer of the atom product’s existence and functions (later in the life of an atom products, the goal of advertising was to build an affinity between the consumer and branded product).

When the product or service is made of bits instead of atoms, many innovative (and free!) business models for educating and servicing consumers become possible. Using Free as a marketing method in a bits economy (where the marginal costs of reproduction are near zero) greatly facilitates consumer adoption. The accompanying time and costs are nearly eliminated (delivery for products made of bits uses the Internet, which is both fast and free). When product adoption ramps up among the technological elite due to the free distribution, discussion forums and blogs spontaneously emerge to answer customer questions—facilitating the otherwise perilous transition from elite adoption to mass market. The physical world costs of consumer, distributor and servicer education are greatly reduced and possibly eliminated. Thus, bit products that are free have a greater prospect of going viral and finding near-instant market success. Free is cheaper to market.

Missed the Event? Watch the Video!

Attending “The Free Economy” program was thought provoking and a very good use of time. All panel members and audience participants delivered views and questions that make viewing the Churchill Club’s video a “must” for anyone involved in bit products and services. If you missed the event, ValleyZen highly recommends watching the video. Another Churchill Club success!