Part of the fun (and agony) of the Davos programme is coping with rapid changes. In the microcosm of my agenda, an example has just cropped up. Gary DiCamillo, CEO of Polaroid, was meant to be on my panel on “Putting the customer in your product”. I’ve just had notice that he has cancelled his Davos trip.

So I’m left with Yossi Vardi, Jakob Nielsen and David Kelley, which in itself is a great panel. (Aside: why does Jakob seem to attract controversy out of all proportion to his power/stature/whatever? He’s entangled in a patent wrangle and he was the target of the Wap Forum‘s ire for his sceptical comments on Wap usability. All signs of a good panelist, incidentally.) But now that we’ve lost DiCamillo, should we try for someone else? I think the answer is yes, not least because who knows what might happen in the next two weeks. Yossi, Jakob or David could, for example, get a skiing injury on the Sunday morning sprts day. Then where would we be?

I’ve asked the programme mavens at the Forum to look for alternatives. One name that suggests itself is Dean Kamen, whose enigmatic Ginger project is getting hype on a worldwide scale. That might provide us with the ammunition we need against the Gates plenary pulling power.