I went searching for the “product in 72 hours” results from the TED conference that I blogged about last week. Here’s what I found:

There’s a note buried in the TED site:

Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen (”OverThere” — the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game “of social awareness” collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.

User “klusterbot” has some photos up on Flickr that show the game-in-progress.

Where’s the finished information? The blog posts? The reviews from participants?

Interestingly, nothing on the Kluster press page.

Note to self: if I send out a huge press release with all the hype machine behind me, announcing a product launch on a certain date and time, make sure my PR staff is goes to the mattresses to make sure that the information gets out to the public. Otherwise I’ve wasted a lot of PR karma for my next launch.

From Read/Write Web this morning:

Founder Ben Kaufman, who bankrolled the company in part with money from the sale of his last company Mophie, has organized a gimmick over the course of the TED conference he hopes will prove Kluster’s worth. Kaufman intends to let TED attendees — and users from around the world — design a completely new product over the course of 72 hours.

*cough* been there, done that. Doing it again in Portland in a few months. I think what this shows is that Andrew Hyde’s Startup Weekend model — get a bunch of smart people in a room, give them a challenge, set them loose — has legs and strikes the right chord in people.

I’ll be really interested to hear what Kluster comes up with. Operationally, I’m interested to hear how you can “launch” a physical product – not a website – in 72 hours. There will be a lot of interesting (yet minor) dissimilarities with Startup Weekend. It will be good to compare and contrast.

TED is a 24-year old conference meant to solicit and spread inspiring ideas.  Of course, since I’m usually falling off the last turnip truck into town, I saw my first TED talk just a few weeks ago, thanks to my friend Damon.  You can see Malcolm Gladwell talking about market segmentation here.  Highly recommended.

Based on my experience with that lone video, I’m going to watch as much as I can of this year’s TED2008 conference, which starts this week.  Live video streaming of the talks begins Thursday night at 5:15 PM PDT.

Apparently schedules aren’t necessary for people with five brains, but I only have a puny, normal brain and I can’t seem to find a schedule of speakers for the TED2008 conference anywhere.  Perhaps the TED types communicate not over HTTP, but over TP (Telepathy Protocol).  A kingdom for a schedule!