Tedxbotkyrka-Martin Kallstrom.mov

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, thanks, thank you. Hi. So I'm Martin Källström. I'm the CEO of Twingly, which is a search engine for blogs and microblogs. I'm— I want to talk to you about how I see the Real-Time Web affecting my personal life and probably your personal lives. Because there's a big transformation

[00:00:27] Speaker A: going on in our society that is driven by technology, but also driven by our basic needs of communicating with each other. Almost to the day, 10 years ago, I was going home from work. I was then living in Tokyo. And

[00:00:54] Speaker A: that day was— if you remember this week, probably Wednesday for most of you, there was terrible, terrible weather. It was snowing and really chilling to the bone. And one of the reasons it was so chilling was that we expected it to be warm. And this day, 10 years ago, I came to— going home from work, I came to the train, to the platform where my

[00:01:19] Speaker A: train was supposed to take me home. And it was completely empty of people except for one Japanese girl sitting there shivering in the cold. I had a big coat on and I was freezing as well, but she was really, really lightly dressed. She had a short skirt and a really small top and jacket on. And the train was not coming

[00:01:44] Speaker A: for 5 minutes and 10 minutes and 15 minutes. Those 15 minutes were the longest minutes of my life because I was caring so much about the girl that I just was shaking, all blue. And when the train finally arrived and opened up and lit a light in the sort of Blade Runner-esque

[00:02:09] Speaker A: Tokyo that was chilling us that night, Light and warmth streamed out of the train, and I was so happy for the Japanese girl that we could both get on it. But when I turned around and looked for her, she's still on that cold bench, looking straight into my eyes for the first time during those 15 minutes

[00:02:34] Speaker A: we shared there. And she was looking to me with her eyes filled with tears. And as the doors slid to a close, she blinked and the tears started streaming down her face. And I realized that she wasn't waiting for the train. She was waiting for someone to come with the train. And at that moment, I felt more futile, more powerless than I felt

[00:02:59] Speaker A: my entire life. And that's probably why I still remember it to this day. And— That day, for me, it's a symbol of a moment when I felt that there was very little I could do about the situation, very little value I could bring. I was raised in a family where my parents

[00:03:25] Speaker A: moved me and my siblings When I was 5 years old, I was part of the most brave startup I've seen in my life. My parents moved from Eskilstuna to Femköping, which is a village of 100 people. And

[00:03:51] Speaker A: as we— I was sitting in front of the moving van all the way from Eskilstuna, and the road got smaller and smaller and smaller. Wow. all the way down to when we arrived in the village. And this is amazing, Google having a satellite image like this of this small village. And this is

[00:04:16] Speaker A: only our part of the village, but this yard here, as you can see, with this farm, I spent 10 years of my life. And for my parents, those were the hardest and happiest 10 years of their life. Because in this startup there was no financing. They were bootstrapping from day one, and they had to be cash flow positive because their

[00:04:41] Speaker A: children depended on it. We were living off of nature, and it was only what nature could bring us that allowed us to survive. And that feeling of being left to the Elements of nature, as what we have experienced this week with volcanoes dropping— not literally

[00:05:06] Speaker A: dropping, but putting planes on the ground— was our lives every day. Because the entire economy of this startup I was part of was depending on what the nature brought us every day, and the weather. Yeah. And we had to survive throughout lots and lots of efforts. And

[00:05:32] Speaker A: that's where I think that I got my sort of entrepreneur mind. And what I really see when I'm running my company today is that there's no place of being problem-focused. You have always— you need to be solution-focused. And it's

[00:05:58] Speaker A: similar with a lot of stuff you see on the web. And these are pictures from a blog called thereifixedit.com. And I encourage you all to visit it often. Because there's so many ingenious solutions there. And you really have to look at it as like

[00:06:23] Speaker A: a catalog of solutions. Because the editorial staff running this blog, they bring up pictures to ridicule because they are viewed as a failure. And the failure basically is very amusing to a huge audience. But if

[00:06:48] Speaker A: you look at the pictures from a solution-oriented What is the solution here in this picture? What are they solving here? This— it can look like it's a failure, but it's really a solution to a problem they had, and it's really ingenious. So I'm really happy following this blog, and I really recommend it, therefixedit.com. So

[00:07:16] Speaker A: going back to the To running my company, I also practice Aikido, which I've done for for I think 14 years now, and it's a really really excellent way of experience experiencing focusing on the solution to a problem and not focusing on the problem. When you practice a martial

[00:07:41] Speaker A: art, you have people coming at you screaming and. and hitting you, and you have to deal with it right now without even thinking and getting into your backbone the idea of focusing on the solution to a problem. And how does this relate to sort of the real-time web, to Twitter and Facebook and so on? If

[00:08:09] Speaker A: you look at what happens when— what has happened the past couple of years is that more and more of our everyday conversations are moving online. And what this means is that we are no longer alone with our problems, our sorrows, or our desires. We can go out there and share them, and we can care for each other. When I

[00:08:35] Speaker A: lived in that village, Femko, of 100 people, when I moved there, There was one boy. I was 5 years old. There was one more kid my age. I was lucky there was one more kid my age. We didn't share a single interest. He was one year older, he was really interested in motorcycles. I couldn't care less about motorcycles. We became best friends because there were no other kids

[00:09:00] Speaker A: there. And the reality today in the cities we live in is that kids can live among thousands of people and not being able to connect to even one of them. And I think that's the reality for tens of thousands of people, of kids in Sweden today. But with the advent of the internet, they can find friends. And

[00:09:25] Speaker A: if there had been a real-time web when I was a kid, I probably would have had a lot more friends, even though I lived in that village. Yeah. And I today, when I've grown up, I have lots of friends that are willing to move out to the countryside. They doesn't feel it as becoming isolated because they still have the community on on the social web. They

[00:09:51] Speaker A: still have their friends on Facebook. You can raise your kid living fifty kilometers from a city, but staying in touch with your friends and always. Feeling the support of your friends. And that's an amazing quality of the social web. And we really see a huge transformation of our

[00:10:16] Speaker A: society. And there's still people that are not able to be part of that society. And if you look in Sweden, it's a very small part. My grandmother is really, really angry at TV4. for putting recipes on the web instead of text TV the past couple of years. And she really feels shut out of that

[00:10:41] Speaker A: part of society. But that the transformation that is happening is that it's connecting people much, much more than before. And that it brings more isolation to some people is a price that we have to pay, that society has to pay to make this transformation happen.

[00:11:09] Speaker A: And we are, as an animal, people and humans are living in flocks. This is what happened during the final of the Olympic hockey games between Canada and the US. Water consumption of the Canadian city of Edmonton, and you can see that there's a quite

[00:11:35] Speaker A: strong pattern of collective behavior going on here. And with in Twingly, we try to. Build solutions that allow this collective behavior to happen, but to connect people while it happens, to allow

[00:12:00] Speaker A: people to have a social experience when they experience these events. And here's, for example, this Camel fam that has a product called Twingly Live running side by side with their direct Broadcast on the web, and it's also a very powerful tool for enhancing

[00:12:26] Speaker A: the experience of people coming to events like TED, or in this case, Aftenbladets bloggpriset. Tokyo is a city that looks a lot like Blade Runner, the movie, and I don't think it's a coincidence. I think they modeled Blade Runner after cities like Tokyo. to a very large

[00:12:51] Speaker A: extent. I don't know if all of you have seen Blade Runner or remember what the movie is about. In very short terms, it's about the hero of the movie going after and killing replicants, androids. And it's not like Android phones,

[00:13:16] Speaker A: but it's actually— Robots. Androids that look a lot like humans. And in the society the movie depicts, it's illegal to be a replica. But by the end of the movie, we find out that the replicas he is hunting actually is showing more human behavior than he is himself. And he kills

[00:13:42] Speaker A: the sort of female, hairy android featuring in the movie. The male android also featured becomes shows the same signs of sorrow as a human would, and in the end when the android, which is his name is

[00:14:07] Speaker A: Roy, when he is dying as well, there's a very famous quote from the movie that basically said where basically says that. The things that I've seen, you wouldn't believe. The things that I've experienced will now, when I die, they will vanish. And

[00:14:35] Speaker A: the thing happening with the real-time web is that we are recording every moment of our lives. I have a very— one of the more transforming events of my life was sadly when my father passed away when I was 22 years old. It was 13 years ago now. I went to visit him a couple of weeks just before he died for a weekend. And

[00:15:00] Speaker A: I sort of envisioned— I know that he didn't have a long life left. Yeah. That was— we were counting the weeks and days. I sort of envisioned that us spending a weekend together and him sort of transmitting the wisdom of his life onto me during that weekend. You

[00:15:26] Speaker A: can see the futility in that idea and the naivety in that. And I realized during the weekend that all we could do was Have breakfast together, sit and talk, talk about the weather, look through the windows, have lunch together, and just spend the day together. But

[00:15:53] Speaker A: when I went home with the bus that day, leaving him and realizing that quite possibly, and as a matter of fact, was the last time I saw him, I realized that he had succeeded to transmit the wisdom of his life to me because I realized what matters are those everyday conversations that we

[00:16:18] Speaker A: have together. When we talk about the weather, when we share with each other what we do, that is the fabric of human society. That's what matters. It's not— It's not the big ideas. The big evolutionary step in science—it's not the technology that transformed society; it's humans communicating. And I really, really think

[00:16:44] Speaker A: that that the transformation going on on the web, connecting people more and more, making us more and more social. connected and less and less isolated is making us more and more human every day. Thank you very much. Thank you.