Ted.com is the website of the long-running Technology, Entertainment & Design conference. Since 1984 it has brought together many of the world’s leading thinkers and intellectuals, and challenged them to give the talk of their lives in just under 20 minutes.
For many years the conference was an invite only affair, and even then tickets cost around $6,000. Meaning, only the general public had very little benefit from this remarkable series of talks and presentations.
TEDtalks at hand
However in 2006 the website started featuring videos of some of the mini-lectures delivered at TED each year. They continued to add both new and archive videos since then.
The site now resembles a much smaller, Youtube-style videos of some of the world’s leading thinkers.
Hear what THEY have to say
Fancy hearing what Kevin Kelly has to say on the next 5,000 days of the web? Or maybe hear Billy Graham on technology, faith and suffering? Al Gore, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are all up there too, as is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales amongst many others.
The topics vary greatly, but the talks are consistently inspiring, funny and informative, and one could do a lot worse than spend a few hours browsing them.
To inspire you, here’s a little compilation of some of interesting video TEDtalks covering various aspects of tech and business:
Mike Matas: A next generation digital book
A short demonstration of how digital books might look in the near future. The talk explains how encompassing solves everything from video embedding (in the same way that print media might feature mere image ’embedding’) right through to interactive graphical data.
Matas talks about new ways to browse books at various levels. He mentioned browsing whole chapters, individual pages and so on using touchscreen technologies such as pinch or slide sensors.
David Horowitz calls for a ‘moral operating system’
An interesting consideration of Ancient Greek and Enlightenment period philosophical concepts to modern questions. Horowitz talks about the way we create and apply new technological innovation and the power that comes with it.
Chris Anderson: How web video inspires innovation
A fascinating model of how innovation is borne from organisations/groups – and exactly how web video is changing the dynamics of both the organisational/group ecosystem. Anderson talks about what that means for the innovation that comes out of it.
Anderson’s discussion of such crowd accelerated innovation is relevant for everything from his organisation’s future (he works for TED) right through to the potential use of web video in corporate organisations seeking to maximise innovation and creativity.
Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world
This talk posits the upcoming decade for the world of tech and web as being one in which building the social aspect of web gives way to the building of its game layer.
In other words, Priebatsch posits that the job of constructing networks online is pretty much done. The next job is that of working out how to use these networks to influence behaviour. It is something for which he reckons game theory is highly relevant.
Harald Haas: Wireless data from every light bulb
Harald Haas looks at a potential new solution to the increasingly heavy data demands of the modern tech environment – the use of the (relatively large) light spectrum for purposes of data transmission, with the aid of a slightly modified light bulb device.
Mikko Hypponen: Fighting viruses and defending the net
Hypponen, a computing security expert, looks at the current and future security challenges faced by the web in the terms of defending against viruses and the increasingly complex risks that they pose, 25 years after the first ever computer virus was discovered in 1986.
And that’s just a small selection of the 900+ currently available over at TED – enjoy exploring further!
Yet another wonderful example of the internet’s potential for enabling democratic and free access to previously unavailable knowledge, ideas and thinking – well done TED, I for one will be a regular user from now on…
