Ever thought about launching your startup with some influencer star power? What exactly do "advisors" do (and not do)? It takes more than a pretty face to pin point a truly smart advisor partnership. The right fit requires on-brand positioning for both the advisor and the start up, which can be harder than it sounds. Once you find that fit, building a mutually beneficial relationship that aligns both party's interests is well worth the hustle it takes to make it happen. Find out how to stand apart from the pack that's courting your ideal high-profile partner. Also learn how equity deals can be structured in the most compelling way, and how to get that "in" to catch the star's attention.

Turntable.fm came from out of nowhere to become the most addictive new music service. The success of the service shows how we are entering a stage where owning music as an individual is less important than playing it together as a community. Artists are embracing the service as a way to connect directly with their best fans in a live synchronous environment; Talib Kweli, Diplo, ?uestlove, Manchester Orchestra and Ra Ra Riot have all been seen spinning tracks.

In this fireside chat, we will discuss the evolution of and vision for turntable- how can users, artists, agents, managers, labels and advertisers all participate in and benefit from this social music experience.

From broadband spectrum to HDTV, from gaming to Hollywood and social media, innovation is happening through industry, entrepreneurs and technology advances. How is consumer electronics driving innovation in the U.S. and abroad – and what role does design play in consumer electronics innovation? Come hear from the head of an organization that represents 2,000 technology companies and produces the International CES Conference – in conversation with a CE innovation and design leader.

As social and Internet entrepreneurs search for ways to effect IRL social change by using online tools and platforms, the focus has been on social media. However, while social media has been the Internet's buzzword for some time now, research shows that content consumption actually represents 53% of all time spent online. Given that content takes up most consumers' time on the web, it's time to harness it as the most effective way to drive social change in the real world.

One of the great failures of any company - for that matter of a capitalist economy - is ecosystem failure. Great companies build great ecosystems, one in which value is created not just for a single company or group of industry players, but for partners who didn't even exist when the product or service was introduced. Many companies start out creating huge value. Consider Microsoft, whose vision of a computer on every desk and in every home changed the world of computing forever, and created a rich ecosystem for developers. But as Microsoft's growth stalled, they gradually consumed more and more of the opportunity for themselves, and innovators moved elsewhere, to the Internet. Internet innovators like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have also created a rich ecosystem of opportunity, but like Microsoft before them, they are leaving less and less on the table for others. This is a bad trend. Wall Street firms, which got their start trading on behalf of clients, then began trading against them, then created vast Ponzi economies to drain the value from entire segments of the economy are even more dire examples of this trend. But this crisis of capitalism goes beyond individual industry segments. For example, the race by companies to eliminate labor costs has been a short term profit win but a long term loss. Since the cycle of capitalism depends on consumers as well as producers, and consumers are less and less able to find employment, at some point, we're going to have to start thinking about how to put people to work, rather than how to put them out of work. At O'Reilly, we've always tried to live by the slogan "Create more value than you capture." It's a great way to build a sustainable business and a sustainable economy.

Andrew McAfee, author of "Race Against the Machine," will engage with Tim about these ideas, and about how rethinking the economy becomes even more urgent in the face of the trend he explores in his book, in which jobs are being outsourced not just to low-wage countries, but increasingly to machines.

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson discusses her vision for the future of The Times in the digital age in a session moderated by Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith. Does Abramson's leadership at The Times present a blueprint for sustainability for the newspaper industry?

When money flows frictionlessly, good things happen. Good things for small businesses. Good things for consumers. Good things for the economy as a whole. The game layer and the mobile payments space are on a crash course, and it's going to be awesome. So awesome that it’ll force credit card interchange rates to zero and pump 50 billion dollars a year back into the economy. Sounds crazy, but before Al Gore invented the internet, we never imagined information would flow so freely. As soon as the friction was removed from information-transfer, a new economy emerged that changed the way we do business. The same is about to happen with money. It's just another medium of information, and it's high time to suck the friction out of the economy. There are two elements driving this transition to interchange zero 1) the technology that’s driving fees down (along with some far-reaching legislation thanks to Dick Durbin) and 2) the information inherent in payments that’s being leveraged to drive revenues up. Join Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja of SCVNGR + LevelUp for a fast-paced session on how a combination of mobile payment startups (even the ones being formed by big companies), The Durbin Amendment, and a tipping point in consumer behavior will completely change the way we think about money -- maybe even re-wire how our economy works.

The internet was supposed to allow media outlets not only to display the talent of their writers -- but to capture the intelligence of the audience. Remember that rhetoric? We've abandoned it; the most that publishers can claim is that their comments are not quite as bad as the competition's. Trolls and spammers are not the problem. They can be dealt with by brute-force moderation. The real tragedy: the triumph of mediocrity. People with time on their hands drown out more valuable contributors. We've all designed discussion systems with the most avid commenters in mind. We've given them stars and moderating powers and allowed them to develop cliques and a sense of ownership that shades into entitlement. They are not the only readers. They are not even the smartest of our readers. If we're truly to capture the intelligence of the audience, we need to design for the most intelligent of the audience.

Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing—fast. Diamandis will address how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and many other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous two hundred years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. Diamandis explores how four emerging forces—exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion—are conspiring to solve our biggest problems.

Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site. Yet, what do we really know about them? If you create great links, your users easily find everything they need on your site. If you do a poor job, your users will find your site impossible or frustrating. We never discuss what truly makes a good link good. Until now. Jared will show you the latest thinking behind the art and science of making great links. Join him for this entertaining and amusing look at the secret lives of our site's links.

”Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch…”,lyrics from Fiddler on the Roof about finding a perfect partner. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have someone to guide you towards what is a match for you, advise you in your career life, help you weed through the losers to find the fabulous ‘one’ that will make you whistle on your way to work AND whistle on the way home?

In Hunt or Be Hunted - How to get the Design Job you Really Want, you will be privy to the insights and success stories of three of the industry’s most respected representatives in their knowledge domains. You will also hear from a leading expert in the placement of designers. Each will relate real-world experience, guiding audience members through the maze of questions a designer has in this frenetic job market.

Who are you as a designer? What do you want to do, and how do you know it's the right thing. What's your story? How to present yourself, your portfolio, and where you want to be. Where should you be full time or freelance? What that means to your life, your career and how you are viewed. When is it right? To look, to change, to know if this is the one. How do you get there? Choosing the right company, assessing/selling to what they need, closing the deal. Don’t be left in the dark. Don’t make blind decisions. Be informed, be guided, then be sure. Listen to these respected resources to help yourself to, “…find me the perfect match.”

Moments of joy... moments of happiness... moments of gratitude. These are all moments that describe our lives. It is very easy to mistake these as only moments that happen in real life. One fundamental key part of how the web has evolved has involved emotion. Emotion has become more explicit in our actions online. Companies are faster becoming aware that, as obvious as it may seem, humans are at the receiving end of the UI and design theme that you have just created. We no longer simply engage in actions; we "like". We contribute content and are immediately validated through social interactions. What is obvious is that there's another person we're interacting with. What's even more obvious is what we're supposed to feel. In this digital era, there's a field of science that has been largely underutilized until now: affective science. In our work at Kiip, we have realized just how core the "happiness moment" is to our business model. Just how raw emotion can be directly tied to an achievement in a game - we have designed not only a UI but a "emotive" experience around harnessing the elements of the happiness that surrounds a simple interaction. Do you want to share? Do you want to gift? Do you want to save it? Is it fleeting? How can you control it? How do you have more of it later? In this session we'll hear, for the first time, from companies in the mobile and web space that have harnessed not only emotional power - but pressure - to drive their business models all using the currency of happiness. Not only have some of them accidentally created models that capture this emotion beautifully, but some of them have now learned how to sustain it. Happiness is the missing resource in your company. Learn how to capture it.

Bing Gordon knows how to spread magic dust: Look anywhere from Amazon to Zynga. A master of disruption, he's blessed with 20/20 vision into all things gaming and social. Go beyond the buzzwords as the former Electronic Arts executive, legendary video game pioneer, investor in online social gaming company Zynga, and partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers sits down with Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Brad Stone to help us understand how both trends are changing the way people engage, behave and consume. Bing explores why gamification and socialization have moved into the mainstream - and into our bloodstream. He explains how these concepts and strategies are relevant to just about everyone, from entrepreneurs to marketing professionals to musicians and students. Bing also discusses how game and social design principles are used to heighten the "wow" quotient in products, services and change consumer experience.

The continuing global economic and political crisis should be the wakeup call to the world. We need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, but are no longer able. Many traditional economic and social pillars of the industrial age have come to the end of their life cycle. Yet, enabled by the digital revolution there is dramatic change occurring everywhere, from Cairo streets to Wall Street, from the lecture halls of our universities to the halls of government. How can we rethink our economy and society for the new age? Don Tapscott is one of the world's leading thinkers about new technology, new media and innovation in business and society. He is the author of 14 widely read books, most recently Macrowikinomics, and was named one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 in 2011.