Report from TED 2010

I'm at the TED conference this week, held in Long Beach, California. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it is an annual gathering of amazing ideas and stories. Here's a list of TED 2010 speakers.

In past years, I've posted summaries of all the presentations, but this year I'm going to write a daily wrap-up instead. I'll post my first this evening.

The highlight of TED each year is the TED prize. The winner of this year's prize is celebrity chef and international nutrition advocate Jamie Oliver, who gets $100,000 and "the opportunity to present his wish to change the world." CNN is live streaming Oliver’s talk, "in which he will reveal his one wish to change the world." You'll be able to watch it here at 8:50 p.m. (ET).

I was happy to learn that Intelligentsia Coffee is making espresso drinks for everyone at TED, and our pal Kyle Glanville, Intelligentsia's director of espresso research and development and first place winner of the National Barista Championship, is pulling shots. Kyle just made me a mind bending double espresso!

Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro is about to perform, so I'm signing off to enjoy his performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Above, a multiscreen, ultrafast Google Earth station, called Liquid Galaxy. I shot a video that I'll upload later. Photo by Marla Aufmuth, an old Wired colleague of mine.

• [caseyd]

  Find and say Hi to Steffi Czerny for me, please. She’s from DLD, and is a lot of clever fun. She’s a connextionista.

• [Joe]

  The program is a Flash app? How lovely for anyone who’s visually handicapped, or using a mobile device (like an iPad) without Flash support.

  • [Chesterfield]

    @Joe – what’s your point? It’s also in English which is useless to billions of people. How lovely is that?

• [Xenu]

  Moot — the guy who runs 4chan — is giving a TED talk?

  WTF?

• [NickD]

  Hey Mark.
  What are you doing after TED tonight? How about a BB reader meetup in downtown Long Beach?

  • [Mark Frauenfelder]

    Thanks for the invite, Nik. But I am commuting back home each night. I can’t stand being away from my wife and kids!

• [swag]

  God, I hate the all-sizzle-and-no-steak format that is TED.

• [sebastian6]

  Thank God they’re giving a celebrity chef $100,000. How else could he realize his dreams and support himself?

• [Anonymous]

  BIL is a free and open-invite conference coincidentally just down the street from TED.

  http://2010.bilconference.com/

  The speaker list:
  http://2010.bilconference.com/category/speakers/

  Mark, would you like to give a talk?

• [davidasposted]

  I hope Oliver’s “wish” is better imagined and executed than Karen Armstrong’s ridiculous ‘Charter for Compassion’ …

• [Anonymous]

  Here’s a list of TED 2010 speakers.

  If only!

  The braniacs at TED don’t know how to make a simple list. Instead, we get to use a flash based whack-a-mole menu to figure out who’s going to be speaking.

  They’ve been doing this kind of thing for years and it is stupid and annoying, and difficult to use. Way to go!

  I defy anyone to find a simple but comprehensive, TED-authored list of speakers past and present. Links would be great too, but I don’t want to make it to tough on them…

  • [Chesterfield]

    Here’s a link to the TED 2010 speakers:
    http://conferences.ted.com/TED2010/program/speakers.php

    If you go to the main site you can find a alphabetized list of all the past speakers as well.

    • [Anonymous]

      Thanks for the list for this year. It’s an improvement over the whack-a-mole page.

      But like I said, try to find a **single** simple list of all speakers past and present. What you linked to was the first page of 44 more pages of speakers. That’s 44 lists, not one.

      Here’s a slight improvement: page 1 of 10 of a text only list: http://www.ted.com/speakers/atoz

      Why do they do this?

      • [Chesterfield]

        Why do they do this? Because it’s good enough. Put something up and get on to more important things.

        Here’s another source:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TED_Speakers

• [boing_x]

  Thank you. In the dozens of times I’ve seen people blog about TED I’ve never once seen anyone tell what it is, even in the simplest terms. It is always presented as if everyone knows what it is, which is pretty ridiculous, the majority of people have never heard of it. I’ve even searched to try and find out what it is and failed. I only figured it out vaguely through context.

  That kind of thing is a clue to me that maybe it’s not something that I really need to care about. I had got in the habit of ignoring anything about TED when I happened to catch the words “TED stands for…”

  bb

  • [Chesterfield]

    #17 – The correct site is the first result for both Google and Bing when you search for “ted”. What search engine or search terms did you use?

    You might want to look over the past talks. I’d be shocked if you couldn’t find at least a few talks worth watching. Somebody else complained that the talks aren’t substantial enough. I disagree – the format makes the subject matter very accessible to people who aren’t experts in that domain.

    Ha! My captcha is “braying johnson”.

• [Stefan Jones]

  Nice gig, Mark! It must be cool to attend in person.

  I appreciate the digest format. I remember the posts coming fast and furious last year.

• [Anonymous]

  Jamie Oliver? I think you got the “smug bastard” tag one article too late…