Ian On The Red Dot

Earlier this evening was an event organized by TDM where Vinton Cerf from Google shared this thoughts about the future of the Internet. Some people might say his visions of the future, he joked that it might be hallucinations. You just got to love a guy who is self-deprecating.

Three things about Vinton Cerf. The first was that as he walked pass us, he made the first move to acknowledge our existence. The second was that he made a comment that he didn’t want to be the guy who comes to talk but not listen. The third thing I’ll touch on soon.

SimplyJean liveblogged the event here. Some tweets from the event here and here. Someone was videotaping the event so I’ll leave you to watch the video when it comes out to know what he shared tonight. The reason is this - I could try to summarize what he said, but it would be meaningless, because tonight while partly was about what he had to say, it was how he said it that really mattered and you should watch the video to get a better experience of what happened tonight.

Here is the third thing about Vinton Cerf. He demonstrated tonight that no matter how intelligent you are, or how brilliant your idea is, everything is for naught if you do not have the power to communicate it. I’m not sure how other people would describe Vinton Cerf, but if I had to describe him in one sentence, I would say he is a brilliant communicator.

He is undoubtedly a brilliant guy. When he spoke, it was in a way that didn’t make any of us feel stupid. It wasn’t that he spoke about simplistic stuff but that he was able to distill and communicate his thoughts in a way that we could understand and actually feel smart, if not become smarter, because we understood his reasoning, his feelings and his thoughts.

He spoke brilliantly, clearly and eloquently.

As we were leaving the room, my ex-coursemate from NUS and me commented rather wistfully that if we only had more professors like that in NUS.

But no matter, tonight was a really special night for me. It isn’t often that I feel that I have been in the presence of greatness. Tonight was one of those nights.

I am sincerely grateful to TDM for organizing this event and creating the opportunity to listen from someone like Vinton Cerf. Hopefully, there will be many such nights to come.

For now, I will never forget the experience I had in room 325.

Added: James brought up the Starhub blocking of BitTorrent incident after Vinton Cerf talked about net neutrality. Vinton’s response was amazingly balanced and reasonable, almost sympathetic towards Starhub - It really says something about him as a thinker.