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"As you may know, each Friday we do an informal poll to find out what Mashable readers think of a particular topic du jour. This week, since we're at TED with some of the best and brightest minds working hard to change the world, we thought we should take the Friday Poll on location and find out what TED attendees have to say about this week's topic.\nWe asked a number of TEDsters the following question: \"What do you think is the most interesting thing happening in technology right now?\" Below is a sample of the answers we got back, featuring a range of responses as diverse as the contributors they came from. What do you think is the most interesting technology trend today? Let us know in the comments.\n\nDi Winkler, CEO of Summer Foundation \u2014 Tools and innovations that help people with disabilities do things they otherwise wouldn't be able to and even in some ways to become superhuman.\nJane Wulf, TED scribe \u2014 Open data. As transparency increases in government, the supply chain and elsewhere, we have so much more access to information and are able to use it in so many ways.\nRod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN \u2014 The explosion of smartphones in the developing world, increasing education and community organizing there. Also, the movement to keep the Internet unified, not Balkanized and forked by different countries' interests.\nAndrew Bird, musician \u2014 Philosophy is more interesting than technology. Mashable: What do you think about tools that bring music creation to aspiring artists more cheaply? Andrew: I think live performance has become even more valuable because it allows for improvisation and unexpectedness, in contrast to tools that can allow too much perfection in the studio.\nLakshmi Pratury, founder and co-host of TED India \u2014 How technology is being used to further the human mind. We've finally gone beyond tech for tech's sake and are using technology to make a difference in the world.\nPerry Chen, CEO and co-founder of Kickstarter \u2014 Mark Roth's work on suspended animation. Also Microsoft Pivot, for starting to bring whole new ways of browsing the web.\nJuliana Machado Ferreira, biologist at Sao Paulo University and TED senior fellow \u2014 Whole genome sequencing. \nDean Guida, CEO of Infragistics  \u2014 Cloud computing and collaborative software that allows distributed teams to work together across place and time.\nJulianne Wurm, founder of R-cubed educational consultancy \u2014 Microsoft Surface and touchscreens in general; MIT Media Lab's Siftables; and the iPad. I'm in education, and I think these kinds of tools are going to be incredibly important there.\nRalph Simon, CEO of Mobilium and chairman emeritus of Mobile Entertainment Forum \u2014 The emergence of smartphone components in entry-level phones in the developing world, which is accelerating Internet access for so many people who wouldn't otherwise have it. Also augmented reality, mobile health applications, and mobile money for the unbanked.\nVirginia Miracle, SVP of digital strategy at Ogilvy \u2014 The collision of our online and offline identities and the concept of an open universal identity.\nFarhad Mohit, founder and CEO of Dotspots \u2014 Tim Berners-Lee's concept of an open web of linked data. We're enabling a kind of \"information militia\" that can make better, more informed decisions. Information is power and when people have power, everything changes.\nRachel Pike, Ph.D. and atmospheric chemist at the University of Cambridge \u2014 Personal and scientific data sharing, and the crowd-sourcing of science making more vital data publicly available.\nKimberly De Los Santos, associate vice president, Arizona State University \u2014 Social media. Not any specific platforms per se, but the connections across cultures they enable.\nDonald Samuels, managing partner at Pictorial Offset Corporation \u2014 QR codes. They'll become ubiquitous and all our devices will read them and take us directly to information.\nJenny Lam, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market software company \u2014 Threadless, Blurb and other tools that let artists create something physical and get it out to the public on-demand and at high quality.\nHillel Cooperman, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market \u2014 The falling cost of creating software, and new devices that have commerce built in so that customers can get payments to software developers, are both contributing to a renaissance in software development.\nDebra Silver, international board member of Save a Child's Heart \u2014 Touchscreens. I'm a sculptor so I love to see computers getting more tactile!\nPeter Knights, executive director of WildAid \u2014 Work on cold fusion. Energy solutions are the most important thing right now. And the Nexus One Google just gave me is pretty cool too!\nTodd Grant, creative director of Switzerland West \u2014 The disappearance of technology as it becomes a natural and intuitive part of our daily lives, so much so that we don't always notice it.\nDavid Wish, founder of Little Kids Rock \u2014 Gift economies and the impact that the web is having on economics overall.\nSunny Bates, partner at Icarus Talks \u2014 Microsoft Pivot, Bing Maps and real-life photo integrations, and all the new ways of visualizing information coming online.\nStephen Petranek, editor-in-chief at Weider History Group magazines \u2014 Applications made possible by putting genetic code onto discs. Imagine taking your DNA sequence on a chip to the supermarket and having it tell you what foods you should be eating.\n\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, ericsphotography"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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