From left: James Randi at TED2007; Jehane Noujaim at TED2006; Ze Frank at TED2005
What the press says about TED
Over the course of a few days, my inner cynic was beaten to a pulp by a rush of impressive presentations and a bounty of great conversations over meals and in hallway encounters. It isn’t often you get to have a conversation with Jeff Bezos and Daryl Hannah—at the same time. Or finish a chat with a Google engineer and look skyward to see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Or get a shot at helping the likes of Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson to make a giant catalog of all life on earth.
-- Steven Levy, Newsweek, "Dr. TEDlove," 3/16/07
Where the entrepreneurial nature of investors like Doerr and Vinod Khosla meets the celebrity power of Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker or singer Paul Simon. Pepper in heavyweight academics like Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann and a few politicians like the 42nd President of the U.S., Bill Clinton, and you have a promising team for social change.
-- Jessi Hempel, BusinessWeek, "The Talk of TED," 3/12/07
I have attended twelve TEDs since 1992 (including TED events in Toronto and New York) and I can't recall any past TED that included as many standing ovations as the one just concluded Saturday at the Monterey Conference Center, where the events have been held since founded by Richard Saul Wurman in 1984.
-- Jack Myers, Media Village, "TED Conference Attendees: Electrified, Energized and Motivated," 3/12/07
TED is, in short, an annual rite to the faith that humanity, through intelligence and enlightened interest, can fix any problem if it only applies itself.
-- Economist.com, 3/8/07, "Davos for optimists"
The elite clientele and the increasing focus on development issues evoke the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But people who have attended both events say they are very different. Unlike Davos, TED attracts few politicians. And most of the action is in the conference, not in the parties and meeting rooms nearby.
''At Davos the general sessions are nice but very superficial,'' said Jay S. Walker, the founder of Priceline.com and chief executive of Walker Digital. ''It allows the Arabs and the Israelis to meet quietly in a room somewhere. You're not going to meet a Ph.D. in string theory or hear a talk about playing the lute at Davos the way you do at TED.''
-- Saul Hansell, New York Times, "Where Artists and Inventors Plot to Save The World," 3/5/07
Imagine going to school and learning how to tie your shoe correctly one moment and studying the rise of obesity the next.
Then you might hear a 14-year-old piano virtuoso perform and improvise a piece on the spot, followed by a talk on global warming.
They are just some of the presentations that the 1,000 or so invitation-only attendees have been treated to each year at the four-day Ted Conference, a gathering that mixes "technology, entertainment and design."
-- Ellen Lee, San Francisco Chronicle, "TED Conference Open for New Ideas," 3/7/07
TED curator Chris Anderson and staff manage each year to capture some of the high-level memes running through the culture in their selection of speakers. This week's speakers include Virgin's Richard Branson, who is expected to talk about his new commercial space venture Virgin Galactic. ... [Other speakers include] Lost and Alias creator J.J. Abrams, science authors Daniel Goleman and Michael Pollan, planetary scientist Carolyn Porco and Zipcar founder Robin Chase.
Those are some of the big names. But often it's the unexpected and unknown presenters who steal the show. Last year two of the most talked-about presentations came from Jeff Han and Hans Rosling.
Han, a young computer scientist at New York University, was mobbed by audience members wanting a closer look at his eye-popping multi-touch sensor display. He has since launched a company, Perceptive Pixel, to advance his creation.
Rosling, a professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, succeeded to make statistics sexy while simultaneously changing perceptions of the developing world with his free Gapminder software.
Both are back this year for encore presentations.
-- Kim Zetter, Wired.com, "Digerati en Route to TED," 3/6/07
TED is a place where "you meet people who are smarter than you are," explains Max Levchin, who founded the PayPal Web-payment service at 23. Levchin's highlight came three years ago when he bumped into Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, while sipping free Starbucks at the conference. "I would have said, this is the greatest moment of my life," Levchin says. "But then I turned around and immediately met Craig Venter," mapper of the human genome.
-- BusinessWeek, "Forget Davos, I'm booked up for TED," 3/3/07
Along with the visions, there are two other benefits to TED. One is the networking. The other is the therapeutic effect of 96 hours in a willing suspension of cynicism, doubt and irony, as all these amazing visions are displayed. Most of the talkers deserved their standing ovations. For three days, some of the world's best and most successful minds gathered to take themselves, life and the world seriously, in a spirit of comradeship and without fear of ridicule.
-- Quentin Hardy, Forbes, "What a Billionaire (Really) Wants," 3/1/04
Many long-term TEDizens were concerned that Chris Anderson's new focus on social and economic problems would rob TED of its magic, but instead it has deepened its meaning. The presentations and the hallway conversations were as thought-provoking as ever, although there is more emphasis on science and less on entertainment than in the past. What is new is a sense of community, or as one new participant put it, "belonging to a tribe."
-- Christopher Herot's Weblog, 3/7/06
