Once a year, the good and the great converge on Vancouver, Canada for the TED conference: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Nearly 2,000 people gathered for a week to consider our past, present and future. There was something interesting about the talks this week. While there were a few technological marvels -- swarms of tiny, self-organizing robots, for example, or a personal cargo-carrying robot that follows you around with your shopping -- many of the talks dealt not with technology, but humanity.

Where does the signal to pull your hand away from heat originate? If your answer is the brain, you've already been burned. Instinctively, we pull our hand back without conscious thought, because the response to the stimulus takes a short cut and originates in the spinal cord because of the need for quick action. According to venture capitalist Peter Levine, computing may soon need this type of shortcut.

Are we entering into the Golden Age of Retargeting? There are a number of companies that do retargeting, but how many are really doing it well? You can probably guess from the fact that I'm posing the question that I think we still have a long way to go, but things are far better than they used to be.

It's probably the biggest hurdle any B2B vendor has to get over. It's called the Status Quo Bias, and it's deadly in any high-risk purchase scenario.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a simple marketing world. Creative agencies created advertising, the media department and the media agency devised a media plan (read: TV plan with some ornamental other media), consumers saw said TV campaign and flocked to brick-and-mortar stores and bought the brand or service. If they weren't buying, then at the very least the consumers' perception of the brand or service was improving, as driven by those witty TV ads.

TV ads are about to undergo a huge shift in how they are bought and sold. This change isn't just about the big announcements of late about audience-based TV ads - the OpenAP consortia from Fox, Turner and Viacom, as well as NBCU's announcement that it would reserve $1 billion of its inventory this year for audience-based sales.Nope, something even more fundamental is happening in media, and it's going to have its biggest impact on TV. The future of TV will be about performance.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. This proverbial statement is especially true for marketers in a corporate setting when disparate groups who rely on one another (at least to some extent) are unable to communicate in the proper fashion. For marketing success to happen, everyone has to be aligned - and in many cases they are simply too distracted to be aligned.

I have to confess, I was actually a fan of Google's "Don't be evil" philosophy. Predictably, once the company went public with it, the cynics were quick to tear it apart. Was it naive? Of course it was. And yet, these days, maybe we need more of that particular type of naivete.

I think it's fair to say that consumers have embraced the new "stories" platforms to express themselves to their friends, family members or hundreds of thousands of followers. I'm just not sure consumers appreciate or watch those same platforms with the same level of interest when the story comes from Gatorade, Mastercard or Ford. And why am I not sure? Because we have no standardized, publicly available data.

We've all heard the promises: Technology is going to give us a better world. It will allow us to feed the masses, democratize education, enjoy unfettered free speech. Healthcare, energy and transport will all be revolutionized and demonetized. We're heading for a brave new world. In many ways things are indeed looking up. Some of these changes are due to technological advances, some to increased levels of education, and some to long-term cultural shifts. But every statistic has multiple interpretations, and every simplistic narrative conceals important nuance.