I recently stumbled across Pop!Tech, a kind of hybrid ideas fest-tech accelerator that combines the best of both. Though the rhetoric is high (it bills itself as a facilitator of “world-changing projects” and a place for “thought leadership”) and the scope wide (they work on everything from healthcare to cultural projects, the non-profit, pop-ified model is interesting.

Its Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows program is a nice touch, for instance, because it brings together young but energetic future leaders, removing any whiff of stuffy academia from its ranks. The 2009 fellows, for instance, include an entrepreneur who developed a mobile phone healthcare system in Malawi and another who found a way to turn agricultural by-products into building insulation called Greensulate (he happens to live in Green Island, New York.)

Pop!Tech also runs a TED-style festival that attracts the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and photographer Chris Jordan and behavioural economist Dan Ariely. This year’s event was held last week. Check out some of the videos, ahem “popcasts,” here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 6:09 am and is filed under Daily Blog, Events, Think Tank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.