At around this time of year, it seems the Internet is 35 percent TEDTalks. TED is a funny phenomenon, though. On the one hand, getting the YouTube generation to sit down and watch lectures seems a counter-intuitive proposition. But there's something about these videos that seems to have captured the Web's shiny, aspirational spirit.
Toronto Globe and Mail
March 19, 2009
Oh why oh why have I been bingeing on TED talks again? I promised myself I would quit watching the ecstatic series of head-rush disquisitions, available online, from violinists, political prisoners, brain scientists, novelists and Bill Clinton. But I can’t. Each hortatory TED talk starts with a bang and keeps banging till it explodes in fireworks. How can I shut it off? The speakers seem fevered, possessed, Pentecostal. No wonder I am, too, now.
The New York Times Magazine
January 23, 2009
The TED Talks program single-handedly popularized the phenomenon of brainy programming. It's an online repository of zippy, often provocative presentations delivered by speakers at the eponymous conference.
Boston Globe
November 2, 2008
... consistently the best thing you can watch on the internet: the TED talks. Brilliant people, in the true sense of the word.
Guardian UK
July 25, 2008
A tech antidote to our current pessimism. Welcome to TED. Founded 25 years ago, the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference is the place for glimpses into the future.
Wall Street Journal
February 9, 2009
There are not many conferences at which a talk by Bill Gates on preventing malaria and educating America's disadvantaged school children would be followed by a discourse on how internet pornography is changing relations between the sexes. But there is at least one. Welcome to TED.
The Economist
February 12, 2009
TED is brimming with innovators, people less interested in figuring out how to prop up the collapsed economy of the last century than in creating an economy for the 21st century.
Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
February 6, 2009
TED consists of a series of talks given by "big thinkers" discussing "big ideas." It is attended by many of the world's leading scientists, academics and business leaders.
BBC
February 5, 2009
To call TED "elitist" makes it sound like snobbery. Not so. Instead, imagine a gathering peppered with dozens of futurists, artists, CEOs, and scientists -- plus a few more folks who defy categorization. They get all together for several days (Feb. 3-7) to listen to mind-blowing talks about everything from population trends to sea creatures. It is an intellectual Mardi Gras.
CBS News
February 9, 2009
Here comes TED, the Bay Area's version of great thinkers and doers gathering at the mountaintop.”
San Francisco Chronicle
February 1, 2009
More cancers will be preventable in 5 to 10 years, using a vaccine. People wearing artificial feet may scale walls a la Spider-Man. Robots will come with lifelike faces that convey human emotion. That was just a sampling of the technology envisioned for the future at TED, the annual gathering of corporate, Hollywood and scientific glitterati touted as a caldron of ideas and innovation.
Reuters
February 6, 2009
Spending a few days at the TED conference simultaneously taxes the brain and inspires the mind. The world's most pressing problems are on constant display, counterbalanced by mind-boggling innovations. It's a marketplace for ideas. A place where issues are discussed and consensus formed.
San Francisco Chronicle
February 7, 2009
Skip 30 Rock tonight and tune in to this Webcast to watch one world-changing dream from each of 2009's TED Prize winners ... Because you won't be watching acceptance speeches. You'll be watching the future. Live.
Esquire
February 5, 2009
TED has become popular for its intense program of tightly timed, polished presentations.... Conference producers have a reputation for surprising the audience of overachievers with at least a speaker or two who arrive largely unknown, but set off a buzz with especially moving or cutting-edge presentations.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
March 30, 2008