NextFest 2008: Interview With Executive Director, Victor Friedburg
In honor of the fifth annual Nextfest, I sat down with the show’s executive director, Victor Friedburg beneath the Suitcase Pavilion exhibit at downtown Chicago’s Millennium Park to talk about the genesis of the event, how its changed over the years, and what role Wired is playing in bringing the cool technologies showcased to the hands of consumers.
Have you been with NextFest since launch?
Yeah, since it was pretty much jut a concept in the minds of Conde Nast and the Wired publishing business side.
How has it evolved over the past five years?
You know, it’s interesting. It’s been pretty organic. When we first conceptualized it, it was supposed to be an event to mark the 10th anniversary of Wired, so it was almost conceived as a–I won’t say a one-off–but it was an event to bring the magazine to life on its anniversary. It resonated with the public in a way that we didn’t anticipate. Once you finally saw it and came to it in 2004, when we did it in San Francisco, it really started to feel like a World’s Fair. What was it like to see television for the first time?
As a magazine, we cover these types of technologies and these transformative and emerging technologies every month, but the public doesn’t really get to see it. Part of our mission was to inspire the public and bring attention to these innovators in a context that they don’t usually get.
I was at the event last year in Los Angeles, and it seems that it’s changed a bit, even since then.
Yeah, sure.
It’s a little bit smaller and spread out over a longer period of time. What was the reasoning for that?
Well, we knew we were coming back to Chicago. We set up the rotation in the US between the West Coast, Chicago, and New York. We’d always wanted to do it in Millennium Park. In 2005, we actually tried to do it here, but it had just been built, so Mayor Daley didn’t feel comfortable having an event come in and have the public get its first taste of the park with this external event. We were so successful in 2005 with the city that, when we decided to come back, we revisted the Millennium Park option and they finally said “yes.” It’s a different feel from a convention center. This positions it much more as a cultural event.
At the Los Angeles event, the Mayor came out to speak, and you had Mayor Daley out here at the tent, last night. How large a role are the cities playing in the event?
Chicago’s unusual. It really is a leadership town. So if the mayor’s interested in something like this–which he is, because it aligns to an overall message that they want to communicate to the external world and within their populations that technology is important, innovation is important. It’s important for businesses, it’s important for people’s lives. So they get very actively involved in ways that other cites don’t.
Does the fact that it’s two weeks play a role in getting people involved?
The two weeks was really a business decision. If we were going to come into the park and set this up, and do a smaller event, could we generate the same audience numbers that we’d done in prior years? We just took the gamble that, over two weeks time, we’d see the same amount of people.
It’s down to 40 exhibits now?
About 50 with Toyota and Xerox.
That’s down from how many?
One-hundred.
Is it difficult pairing it down that small?
The format required some changes. In LA, it was a four day blitz. All of the innovators hit town and they are there with their projects and it’s all over in four days. In a big convention center, if you’re an audience member, you come there, and, maybe out of the 100 projects, you see 30. so here we calculated that, if you’re an audience member and you come to NextFest in Millennium Park, you’re actually going to see more projects in a day than you do in the other.
What became another layer was that you can’t keep the exhibitors here for two weeks. These are leading scientists and inventors. They want to get back to work. So, what we did as a format change is, we brought them for the opening reception and for the press day with you guys, and then we’ve trained a bunch of docents and a technical team to run the exhibits while the inventors are back in their labs doing more important work, creating these inventions.
You mentioned the World’s Fair and television earlier, which seems to imply that at least some of these will have practical consumer applications. Do you see these being things that, a few years down the line, we’ll be adopting?
Sure. The history of NextFest has done that. In fact, we played a somewhat active role in creating technology exchanges, and some of those technologies have either gotten large investments or started to come to market. We do have a role to play there. A lot the things you see are really passion projects, so, at the end of the day, they’re visions of people in labs and universities. Some of them will become products, some of them are there solely for experiences now, some of them will go away or transform. They may influence design or approach for other inventors.
There are ultimately two criteria for NextFest, from a curatorial standpoint. One, do we believe that, in a snapshot of time, right now, that it feels transformative? And is it so in a way that would be understood by the general public? So, if you see a hovering lounge chair, it’s something instantaneous. The second thing is, is it real? We don’t do models. It has to be a prototype or an actual interactive experience, in order for it to be invited to participate.
Looking back in the past five years, as far a things that have come to market, is there an example that you can point to that we are seeing now?
Sure. A great story from NextFest 2006 was that we were one of the first public shows to show this company Novamer. From an events standpoint, it was one of the least sexy things here, but it’s basically four jars on a table. Oil of citrus, when mixed with CO2 and a proprietary catalyst, you have biodegradable plastic. I mean, what could be more important than that?
When we showed that, President Bush had sent up Jim Conatin, who was the chief of environmental quality for the white house. The first thing that we showed him was this very unsexy exhibit. It was just fascinating watching the two of them have their exchange. The Novamer guys had the proprietary IP on this catalyst, but they couldn’t scale it. It was too expensive to make a small piece of plastic for a consumer application. So they talking and Conatin talked about how the coal industry has these mountains of CO2 that they don’t know what to do with.
They had all this scale on this side and the catalyst on this side. All they needed then was a manufacturing partner and capital. We started those conversations and I got a letter from president of Novamer, seven months ago, saying that, based on their experience, they had gotten a $10 million VC round. Brainball got licensed by a Canadian company to start to figure out how to make that to a commercial product. Last year at the LA show, the solar car from Astrolab–those are starting to go to market.
Original post by Brian Heater