Dr. Larry Brilliant, today’s first speaker at the annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, has marked a turn in the tone of this seminal conference. Brilliant, a long-time philanthropist who has spent his life helping fight disease around the world, is the executive director of Google.Org, the search giant’s attempt to make a difference in the world, and he opened the main stage conversations and “high order bits,” with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly.

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