At Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Half Moon Bay, CA

Today through Wednesday I am the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, about 45 minutes south of San Francisco. After a Segway tour along the Pacific this afternoon, the sessions began at 4pm. We’ve heard from Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, and Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit.

Here are some notes on what some of the panelists spoke about:

Dell

• 500,000 people per day who come onto the internet for the first time
  large majority are outside the United States
• Long term bull on the long term impact technology can have on society
• Came back as CEO for second time
• Put his ‘big ears’ on, listened to the employees
• Thought of themselves as a company that listened
• Will have about 2 billion conversations with our customers this year
• centrally controlled tops-down is not most response way
• We should have fiber to the home

Benioff

• It’s not just company talking with customers, but customers talking with eachother in a one to many conversation
• Customers are able to gang up on us
• The acceleration of the soul of the world
• Fareed Zakaria - Post-american World
• The internet is the great accelerator in societal evolution
• A change in the world can only happen if there is a change in conciousness
• Dalai Llama - world peace comes through inner peace
• web 1.0 - transact
• web 2.0 - collaborate
• web 3.0 - innovate (via platform)                                                         

Brad Smith, 5th CEO of Intuit in 25 years

• 50 million end users
• Connecting florists with florists in different zip codes
• Intuit now 50% SaaS

Other livebloggers at the conference include:

• Joi Ito
  Chief Executive Officer, Creative Commons
• Rebecca MacKinnon
  Co-founder, Global Voices
  Assistant Professor
  University of Hong Kong
• Amy Messenger
  Managing Director, U.S. Technology Practice Head
  Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
• Chris Elam
  Founder and Director
  Misnomer Dance Theater
• Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz
  Chief Executive Officer, vpod.tv
• Aaron Houghton
  Co-founder and Chairman, iContact
• Frank Shaw
  President, Microsoft Accounts, Worldwide
  Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
• Richard Edelman
  President and CEO, Edelman
• Ryan Allis
  Co-founder and CEO, iContact
• Ross Mayfield
  Chairman, President, and Co-founder
  Socialtext
• Thomas Crampton
  Director, New Business Development
  Next Media
• Per Mosseby
  Chief Executive Officer, Islanders
• Steve Jurvetson
  Managing Director
  Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Bart Becks
  President International and Director
  Netlog
• Julia Boorstin
  CNBC
• Oliver Marks
  ZDNet
• Bruce Carlisle
  CEO, Digital Axel
• Susan Hassler
  Editor in Chief, IEEE Spectrum
• Daniel Kaufmann
  Director, Governance and Anti-Corruption, World Bank Institute