Five Days of Free Music, Art, and Innovation in Charlottesville, VA, April 9th through 13th
The Tom Tom Founders Festival returns in 2014 as the gathering of the year for inventors, creatives, and entrepreneurs in the Mid-Atlantic. The five days of mostly free performances, workshops, and fun in early April will draw innovators nationwide to Charlottesville, transforming the city’s picturesque Downtown Mall into a teeming hub for multi-disciplinary innovation and creativity. Tom Tom is gathering leaders from ten fields in its 2014 programming lineup.
Culture:
MUSIC Hundreds of artists representing the very best in up-and-coming music from Virginia and DC will play over 60 free concerts in multiple venues across Charlottesville’s historic Downtown Mall. Everything from dubstep to zydeco, rap to folk can be found in this eclectic urban festival.
ART Tom Tom turns Charlottesville into a canvas for residents’ and visitors’ creativity. Murals take over retaining walls. Poetry fills the city’s free trolleys. A vintage market spills into a craft fair, and parking spaces become artist habitats. A Design Marathon teams artists with nonprofits, while the Virginia Film Festival screens documentaries about community. Workshops on everyday collecting, comics and zines, and independent fashion all bring art into the open.
FOOD The farms, vineyards, and breweries of the Blue Ridge Valley are second to none on the East Coast. They are the engine of a booming local food culture, inspiring Forbes’ declaration that Charlottesville is the locavore capital of the world. Tom Tom explores this farm to table ecosystem through tastings, tours, and industry panels.
Ideas:
ENTREPRENEURSHIP A Crowdfunded Pitch Night, sponsored by the i.Lab at U.Va, kicks off a deep dive into cultures of founding. East Coast angel investors take a soup to nuts look at dealflow from Silicon Valley to emerging US research hubs like Charlottesville, while talks and workshops on design thinking, social business, and scaling from a small city yield practical lessons for entrepreneurs. The weekend closes with another pitch competition: the Galant Center’s $250k Challenge for students.
TECHNOLOGY IBM’s Cloud Evangelist and all time leading patent holder Rick Hamilton joins Tumblr and local tech all-stars to look at how cloud computing impacts the daily lives of corporations and consumers, changing the nature of work, communication, and privacy.
ENERGY “Alternative” fuels are the new normal, driving a revolution in public attitudes on sustainability. Sandy Reisky, developer of over $1 billion in renewables, joins environmentalists, philanthropists, and inventors in examining this new energy ethic.
HEALTH The future of medicine lies beyond hospital walls, with noninvasive therapies, mobile health technology, and better outpatient and preventive care. Entrepreneurs and scientists share resources for health tech upstarts, including NIH funding and private philanthropy.
EDUCATION A new entrepreneurial mindset is springing up in school systems across the country. It’s called the Maker Revolution, and it’s about teaching children empowerment through collaborative self-sufficiency and project-based curricula. Educators local and national take stock of this new approach.
LAW Virginia and DC are on the leading edge of a revolution in American criminal justice in favor of more humane and affordable sentencing policies. Tom Tom brings together lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, as well as film makers, and police to discuss exoneration as innovation.
The full lineup will be announced in March. Visit www.tomtomfest.com for programming updates.
