There is a phenomenon out there called TED; an internet sensation that has gone viral.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It is a global creative community of the world’s best thinkers, experts, athletes, artists, computer geeks, rocket scientist, politicians, philanthropists, designers and people you have never heard about, but who have great ideas. Two big conferences are produced annually. TED2011 just took place in Long Beach, California and attracted 2000 delegates, which all have to go through an intense vetting procedure before being allowed to spend around £4000 for a ticket. Bill Gates hosted a session, and also Juan Enriquez took over the role as guest curator for one session. It again was a great success.  TEDGlobal, it’s European sister event, will take place this July in Edinburgh and the topic of the conference is ‘The stuff of Life’. More than 60 fantastic speakers will be presenting their ideas over four days and it will celebrate life in all its forms.

The non profit organisation with HQ in New York decided in 2006 to release their talks free of charge via the internet and since then, the influence and importance of TED has multiplied. Led by Chris Anderson, a British ex-journalist and owner of an IT magazine empire at the time, acquired TED on behalf of his Sapling Foundation in 2001. He seems to be a strong thinker with a visionary mind, who has surrounded himself with a powerful team.

TED now has hundreds of other TEDxEvent organisers all over the world and the events model themselves on the two conferences in the US and in Europe, all independently organised under the TEDx licence. TED now also has a TED fellowship and a TEDprize (this year won by artist JR) and talks are translated by volunteers of the TED community in dozens of languages (88 currently). Many of the TEDTalks have been seen many million times. Newest projects are the Open TV project aimed at broadcasters, TEDConversations and TEDBooks.

The talks are not more than 18 minutes long and some are really powerful and extremely mind shifting. Turn off your TV and feed your senses with some inspiring ideas. You will enjoy it and maybe find some creative sparks, which not only make you think, but make you think differently.

Bruno Giussani, TED European Director and Curator of TEDGlobal: “We focus on ideas and on helping them spread as widely and freely as possible. To this end, our various initiatives, including the conferences and the TED.com website, converge into the intention of creating a platform accessible to the largest number, that will contribute to extend and improve the quality of the conversation. There is a thirst for new ways to share knowledge and information and to learn, for a new sense of possibilities, for inspiration, and we strive to respond to that.”

I watched some of the TED2011 sessions on webcast as an “associate member” of TED and indeed, during last week’s conference TED announced the launch of a global brainstorming called TED-ED, for “education”, aimed at gathering inputs on ways to use the TED formats and methods to create educational material.

So my tip for this Saturday is this: If you have not seen a TED talk yet, go and have a look and choose your favourite subject: www.ted.com

Tags: Bill Gates, Bruno Giussani, Chris Anderson, design, entertainment, Juan Enriquez, Open TV project, Sapling Foundation, technology, TED2011, TEDBooks, TEDConversations, TEDFellowship, TEDGlobal, TEDprize, TEDTalk, TEDx

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 12th, 2011 at 7:44 am and is filed under Sharp Saturday Tip, Style, TED, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.