Why Ideas Festivals Are Like ‘Intellectual Viagra’ – CNN
London, England (CNN) — It’s a windy and misty Sunday afternoon in March in the beautiful coastal town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and bleary-eyed travelers are disembarking from a coach after a two-hour journey from London.
But these are no ordinary tourists. Among them are some of the most influential names in British media and politics, and about 150 of them have descended on this sleepy town, best known for being the home of the late composer Benjamin Britten, to attend the Names not Numbers ideas festival.
Sheryl Connelly’s 2013 TED Notes – Coolhunting.com
Each year we travel to Long Beach, CA for TED and each year, though armed with inspiration anew, we’d leave with scattered notes—hammered out on an iPad or illegibly scribbled alongside speaker bios in the TED program—that hardly do justice to the knowledge we’ve gleaned. That was until our friend Sheryl Connelly—Ford Motor Company Futurist, TED alum and note-taker extraordinaire—began sharing with us her illustrated record of the creative conference. Her objective notes have given us a much-needed, definitive summary in the past, and this year we’ve convinced Connelly to share her gift with our readers—available in their entirety as a free, downloadable PDF.
My Perfect Weekend: Bruno Giussani, TED European Director – The Telegraph
Bruno Giussani’s weekdays and weekends are spent flying round the world on the hunt for brilliant speakers for TED, the global idea-sharing network. The nature of my job means I really don’t separate my weekends from the rest of the week.
I’ve been working for TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design] since 2005, when it was an annual conference held in the US and attended by 1,000 people. TED’s aim is to give a platform to speakers from an incredibly broad spectrum of backgrounds [past speakers have included Bill Clinton and Gordon Brown; Bono is speaking at next week’s conference], who present powerful new ideas, theories and research in compelling ways.
TED Is Changing – As The World Becomes More Connected – Forbes
This year, almost a third of the speakers on the TED stage in Long Beach will be coming from a new process that opened the doors of TED to a global community of potential new speakers.
Called The TED Talent Search, the 14 country excursion taped the resourced of the local TEDx organizers and exposed the TED curators to between 20 and 30 speakers in each location. In all almost 350 speakers presented and had their talks video taped by the TED team.
Why Kickstarter and TEDx are the Future of Business
Until recently, if you wanted to make an impact, the only option was to sign on with an organization. It simply wasn’t possible to raise capital, manufacture a product, or organize a mass action without institutional backing.
Planet TEDx – WIRED
One afternoon this past spring, at the public library on Main Street in Bozeman, Montana, I sat in a room with 10 or so other people and watched a video projected on a screen. It was a TED Talk: a speech given the previous March at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, California, and then posted to the organization’s website, TED.com.
TED’s Chris Anderson: The Man Who Made YouTube Clever – The Guardian
Yet TED has brought back the concept of the sermon – 18-minute talks delivered by absolute experts in their fields. Five years ago, when YouTube started out, it was assumed to be where you went to look at cats that looked like Hitler, or people falling off skateboards, but TED Talks, with its short disquisitions on everything from neuroscience to creativity, has just celebrated 500m views on the site. By the end of next year, that figure is expected to reach a billion.
A Conference Makes Learning Free (and Sexy) – New York Times
Unable to meet the growing demand for access to TED, its organizers decided to democratize. They imagined a new conference that was TED but not TED, organized by local groups like schools, businesses, neighborhoods, even friends — at an unTED-like price: free. And so last year the TED principals introduced a new concept called TEDx. They encouraged would-be organizers to apply for free licenses…
How TED Connects the Idea-Hungry Elite – Fast Company
The other day, I got an email from a new friend. The subject line read “Are you a TED talk person?” It linked to an 18-minute video of MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely talking about the bugs in our moral codes. Other friends have sent me videos of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert on the spiritual dimension of creativity; rocker David Byrne on how venue architecture affects musical expression; and UC Berkeley professor Robert Full’s insights into how geckos’ feet stick to a wall.