Conversations with the most influential figures in media and technology.
May 25-27, 2009
Carlsbad, California
Featured Video
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Speaker
Eve Ensler 
Playwright and Founder
V-Day
As founder of a global movement to end violence against women and girls, Ensler is focused on human rights issues across the world and has raised over $70 million. She is best known as the author of "The Vagina Monologues," which has been translated into over 45 languages and performed in over 120 countries,V-Day movement has raised over $70 million dollars. V-Day was named one of Worth magazine's "100 Best Charities" in 2001 and Marie Claire's "Top Ten Charities" in 2006. The latest V-Day campaign, in partnership with UNICEF, is aimed at calling attention to the wide-scale atrocities committed against women and girls in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo--a place where hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped. She is also currently working on a film adaptation of her play, "Necessary Targets," with National Geographic, Independent Features. Ensler, as you might imagine, has a lot to say, and you should listen.
Posts With Eve Ensler
Viral Video: Conflict-Free Technology vs. Blood Phones
The controversy around minerals from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo that are used in a variety of popular consumer tech devices seems to be getting another round of much needed attention. It should get much more than that, as you will see from the videos after the jump.
BoomTown Heads to TED (And Promises No Pretentious Tweets!)
What is it about TED, the iconic conference founded an astonishing 25 years ago, that gets so many people who don’t go in a lather? Nonetheless, the gathering still represents one of the best venues for deep and varied thinking on a wide range of important issues, even if there are moments that might seem twee and elitist to some. TED2010 officially opens tomorrow morning in Long Beach, Calif., although events at the conference actually began last night. Speakers run the gamut and will talk on a wide range of topics, from poverty to clean tech to global warming to ukulele playing.
Kara Visits the Women's Conference (Questions for Ashton Kutcher, Please!)
This morning, BoomTown will be onstage at California First Lady Maria Shriver’s well-known Women’s Conference in Long Beach, Calif., to moderate a panel titled “Changing the World Through the Web.” The panelists include Hollywood actor/producer, Katalyst co-founder and Twitter demigod Ashton Kutcher; Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg; Premal Shah of Kiva.org; and Blue State Digital’s Joe Rospars, who was also new media director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In other words, as a group, they are all either prettier, smarter or better for the planet than anything I have ginned up so far.
For Shame: The Congo Nightmare Continues
Eve Ensler, playwright, activist and creator of V-Day, appeared at the the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in late May to talk about the links between what goes into making mobile phones and human rights violations. There, she shed much needed light on the dire situation in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where some of the worst atrocities are now being committed on the population in a terrible civil war. She predicted it would get worse without massive international intervention. Tragically, she was right.
V-Day Founder Eve Ensler: The Full D7 Session
Onstage in an interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Eve Ensler shed much-needed light on the dire situation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Ensler’s aim is to end the use of rape as a weapon of war there, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops. It is well worth hearing about exactly how some of our everyday gadgets come to us at a terrible price.
V-Day Founder Eve Ensler: The Full D7 Session
Onstage in an interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Eve Ensler shed much-needed light on the dire situation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Ensler’s aim is to end the use of rape as a weapon of war there, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops. It is well worth hearing about exactly how some of our everyday gadgets come to us at a terrible price.
D7 Video: Eve Ensler Calls for Rape-Free Cellphones
“Vagina Monologues” creator, V-Day founder, playwright and activist Eve Ensler took the stage at D7 to talk with Kara Swisher about the Democratic Republic of Congo, columbite tantalite and rape as a weapon of war in a mining industry that provides material essential to the manufacture of high-tech devices.
Eve Ensler Calls for Rape-Free Cellphones
On May 13, 2009, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing called “Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones.” Its purpose: to end the use of rape-as-a-weapon-of-war in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo–a place where 1,100 women a month are raped, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics–cellphones, laptops. Among those who testified, Eve Ensler, playwright of “The Vagina Monologues” and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls–and a speaker at D7.
Welcome to Web 3.0
This year, as we convene the seventh edition of D: All Things Digital, we think something major is happening at the intersection of tech and media, and we think it deserves its own new hyped-up name: Web 3.0. Yes, folks, we are declaring the Web 2.0 era over, because, well, when you run conferences and Web sites, you can say stuff like that.
Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future
Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference. We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.” Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.