Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Where Is Mrs. Feiler Faster?
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Even her own mother wonders. Here's the answer, c/o of Huffington Post (and an employee of the organization):

There has been some news coverage of TED lately. One month ago CBS put online a 10-minutes video report on TED, who attends and what's discussed. This week's BusinessWeek has a story headlined "Forget Davos. I'm booked up for TED", while yesterday's New York TimesWhere artists and investors plot to save the world". While both articles say great things about TED and compare it favorably to the Davos World Economic Forum however, it's worth pointing out that they almost contradict each other. BusinessWeek quotes a former attendee suggesting that TED has become mainly about connections with celebrities; the NY Times writes that TED is now mainly a do-good gathering discussing "photographs of genocide victims, environmentally sustainable AIDS clinics and water-purification systems". describes "

A partial list of speakers includes: venture capitalist John Doerr; demographer Hans Rosling (video); evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald; illustrator Maira Kalman; basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; Nobel Prize winner (for discovering the quark) Murray Gell-Mann; Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig; documentary producer Deborah Scranton; Microsoft's former CTO, dinosaurs hunter and intellectual-property controversial guy Nathan Myhrvold; singer Paul Simon. Ah: Bill Clinton will also speak.

TED was started in 1984 when founder Richard S. Wurman observed the beginning of a powerful convergence between technology, entertainment and design. The first event featured the unveiling of the Macintosh computer and of the compact disc, among other things. But the finances didn't go along with the great lineup of speakers, so it took several years before Wurman tried it again, this time with success. TED has been held in Monterey every year since 1990. For the last four years it has been run by British media entrepreneur Chris Anderson, who sold his publishing house and in 2002 bought TED from Wurman. Chris runs it now as a part of his non-profit Sapling Foundation.

The name of the conference is a bit misleading: the event has grown to be much broader than the three original fields of technology, entertainment and design, encompassing science, media, education, politics, literature, spirituality, energy and environmental issues, and more. The format of the conference is classic: speakers have 18 minutes each for a keynote, and there is no Q&A (most speakers attend the whole conference, hence there are plenty of informal Q&A opportunities during lunches and dinners).

If I'm lucky enough to get any good details, I'll post them here.

Labels: Technology

Posted by B Feiler at 7:01 AM
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