Dr. Daniel Siegel meets with a small group of us for lunch in Santa Monica last week to discuss the relational nature of our minds and our brains…..body/relational and how all of it connects to consciousness. His new book Mindsight explores it in further depth.

Continue to scroll down for part I of the interactive video.

At Long Beach last week, film producer Lawrence Bender gave an early preview of his latest movie Countdown to Zero about nuclear weapons threat. Following the eye-opening film, he takes questions from the audience. While the footage is extremely dark, you can hear the dialogue.

A snippet from a Hollywood Reporter review below and below it, a video shot of the preview Q&A in an extremely dark room.

Ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro, Mary Rowell and Cornelius Dufallo of ETHEL and violinist Robert Vijay Gupta create a new compilation on the fly at TED last week.

Ukulele energy meets D Minor meets classical creation without music meets leg tapping at its best. This group knows how to energize a crowd.

This past week at TED, David Cameron, Britain’s Conservative Party leader talks about a new era in politics, where governments have less power and money and people empowered by technology have more of both.

Below is Al Seckel’s talk in Munich Germany in January on illusions, which will most clearly change your perception of reality.

Al is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on visual and other types of sensory illusions and has authored over 15 books on the subject.

On the DLD Conference stage recently, Spencer Reiss talks about MySpace as well as general social media trends and directions. He writes about new media, alternative energy and commercial space travel for Wired and directs the program for the annual Monaco Media Forum, as well for the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, debuting March 2010.

Cortexica’s Steve Semenzato demos Winefinder at VatorSplash in San Francisco this past week.

The magic behind Winefinder is an image recognition technology that informs a buyer of the kind of wine they are buying simply from a photograph of the label. They can also learn where they can purchase it for less. While currently only available in the U.K, they plan to expand to other countries soon.

Below, find a video series that follow half of an hour long panel hosted by Bancroft on geo-location services this week in San Francisco as part of Social Media Week.

Privacy was addressed for a larger portion of the discussion than I think any of us anticipated, particularly given the fact that it was an all male panel.

One of the ways you can get around privacy issues is by lying, mentions a few of the panelists, because there simply are not easier fool-proof ways to do that today. For example, with Foursquare, which I continue to receive invitations from daily (mostly strangers I have never met), if you accept a friend request, you are automatically giving them your phone number as part of that ‘accept.’

Jeremy Toeman plays the bad cop – “does anyone in the audience question the ability for geo-location services to protect your private data? Not their intent he emphasizes, but their ability to protect your data?”

Says Robert Scoble, it’s less likely for privacy information to leak from the company and more likely to leak by accident from users…..”oh yeah, here’s Kevin’s number.” This kind of thing happens all the time and Scoble uses the credit card fraud example: is it more likely that a privacy leak will happen by accident from the restaurant owner or from the waiter taking the transaction?

Women can protect themselves by checking in as they leave a venue or choosing not to check in at all if it’s not a crowded place where they’re surrounded by lots of friends, particularly strong male friends.

Aside from addressing privacy issues, contextual value-add was discussed. In other words, geo-loco layers on top of apps are valuable if they can automatically detect where you shot a photo and what you shot it of, or if you’re in a region where local advertisers can proactively offer you a coupon or points to a venue you frequent several times a week.

Not everyone agreed, but the bottom line is: geo-location services, particularly on mobile devices are not going away anytime soon. The popularity of new services and people using them are only increasing. It will be up to consumers to control what they release and to whom and whether they open up their audience to knowing what they do and when, or choosing to only share it with close friends and family, i.e., the real value, at least initially.

The video coverage below gives you a snapshot of what industry followers and fans think of where geo-loco is going and the impact it is having now and in the future. Panelist line-up here.

Catching up with Intruders TV in Paris in December during LeWeb.

PICNIC Program Director Kitty Leering talks to me about their upcoming PICNIC event, held in Amsterdam, Holland every September. Think of PICNIC as more of a festival or a cross-discipline platform for creative discussion and collaboration than a conference. Bringing together art, technology, innovation and culture, its unique festival format covers strategy as well as hands-on workshops and matchmaking sessions. Learn more from Kitty below.