From Wall Street to Grameen Bank, the experiences of Durreen Shahnaz’s life are coming together to propel her next project: a stock exchange for socially conscious companies.

What are the most important projects you’re involved with?

I am creating two companies. My first company is Impact Investment Exchange, which is a trading platform. It’s a stock exchange for social enterprises, a platform to allow companies in Asia with a social mission — for-profit or not-for-profit — to expand their impact through raising capital on the platform.

This will be very much a liquid and transparent market, which will bring social enterprises that need capital into contact with the impact investors. These are investors who are actually interested in double or triple bottom lines: more than just financial return, but social return and also environmental return. So that’s sort of the biggest thing in my life right now. It has gotten a lot of momentum on the national and international level.

As I started putting the pieces together for IIX — that’s what they call Impact Investment Exchange — I found out that as there are many entities in Asia that are ready to go to market, there are also many more which are not. I felt there was a need to literally hand-hold them to get them market-ready. So this is where the birth of the second company came. This is actually a not-for-profit, and it’s called Impact Investment Shujog. Shujog is a Bengali word for “opportunity,” and we actually call it just “Shujog.”

ABOVE: Shujog helps prepare social enterprises for the market

Shujog is really focused on fostering growth, maturity, innovation and market-readiness for the social enterprises. So these enterprises that are not ready tomorrow will be ready a few years down the road, to raise capital. In effect what we’re doing is putting the structures in place for better growth and governance, etc. So these are the two companies that are my two new babies and I would say they’re growing up a little too fast.

These are two very big projects. What’s given you the confidence to take them on?

This is the second time around that I’m an entrepreneur. I had my first company, OneNest, 10 years ago. It was a social-purpose business, a for-profit social enterprise, very focused on getting ethical and handmade goods to the market. We worked with all these cooperatives, market finance groups, and artisans from around the world. That’s on one side. But on the other side, I actually did it in a very traditional way in the sense that I wrote a business plan, did the angel round of investment, raised funds there, had some traction and went down and did my equity round — pounded the pavement.

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Created by the team behind An Inconvenient Truth and starring TED2010 speaker (and former CIA covert operative) Valerie Plame Wilson, Countdown to Zero began playing theaters of select cities this week. At TED, Plame spoke about the compelling need to bring the number of nuclear weapons in the world to zero and the film delves further into her argument, with commentary from world leaders like Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Watch the trailer:

Developed and produced by Participant Media, TEDsters Jeff Skoll, Lawrence Bender, Ricky Strauss and Jim Berk all had a big part to play in bringing this critical global issue to the big screen.

After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip. Then, he heard of Mt. Everest’s Lake Imja — a body of water at an altitude of 5300 m, entirely created by recent glacial melting — and began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach swimming and think about climate change. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2010, July 2010 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 9:45)

Watch Lewis Pugh’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

A video recap of TEDGlobal 2010 in pictures and words — set to the tune of Ze Frank’s crowd-sourced song “Chillout.”

And watch for TEDTalks from TEDGlobal 2010, posting all year long on TED.com.

Download the video “TEDGlobal 2010 in pictures” >>

Being announced right now in Washington, DC: A brand-new X Challenge to combat oil spills. The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge is a $1.4 million prize to promote development of new technologies and techniques to capture spilled oil. As Peter Diamandis said at the announcement: “We are not rewarding someone for existing technology. We want to help create new technologies.”

The X Challenge is a one-year competition that begins on August 1, 2010, and culminates in summer 2011, with head-to-head competitive demonstrations taking place at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility (OHMSETT) in Leonardo, New Jersey.

At the event, TEDTalks star David Gallo said: “This prize is very timely: So that the next time this happens, the next time the President says we’ll do everything we can, we will have the necessary technology to do that.”

Starting today, you can visit iprizecleanoceans.org to find rules, requirements and more details — and register your team to enter the challenge.

This X Challenge was first announced at TEDxOilSpill, held in June in DC. Watch the original announcement on the archived livestream — the announcement, from Francis Béland, VP, Prize Development, comes in Session 2 at 01:12:12.

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2010, July 2010 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 19:46)

Watch Laurie Santos’ talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

(Cross-posted from the TEDx Blog) TEDxAmsterdam has thought up a creative way to curate their audience — pose a global challenge to transform an ‘idea worth spreading’ to an ‘idea worth doing.’

Entrants are encouraged to realize an idea before October 19 — and document their progress through photos, video, testimonials or press. 100 winners will receive tickets to TEDxAmsterdam on November 30, 2010. Enter your idea here.

TEDxAmsterdam organizers have already released a few in a series of videos to promote the project. In this video below, their second, people ‘break up’ with their ideas, but are encouraged to nurture and love them by submitting them to the TEDxAmsterdam competition:

Watch the first episode of the ‘Ideas Worth Doing’ challenge.

Break down the oil slick, keep it off the shores: that’s grounds for pumping toxic dispersant into the Gulf, say clean-up overseers. Susan Shaw shows evidence it’s sparing some beaches only at devastating cost to the health of the deep sea. (Recorded at TEDxOilSpill, June 2010 in Washington, DC. Duration: 16:43)

Watch Susan Shaw’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

Tonight (Tuesday, July 27) on NBC TV stations, Tony Robbins debuts his first-ever TV series, Breakthrough with Tony Robbins. In the six-episode series, Robbins works with six people facing an extreme life challenge, inspiring them to become more resilient and find the inner resources to build better lives and relationships. Find more information on the Breakthrough mini-site, or watch the trailer above for a sample — or watch Tony Robbins’ TEDTalk to get a sense of his energetic, empowering style.

At the start of Session 12 of TEDGlobal 2010, Chris Anderson announced a mystery guest. “There’s a site some of you may know, called WikiLeaks.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange steps onstage for a surprise appearance at TEDGlobal 2010, in a Q&A with Chris.

We learned how WikiLeaks works: “We’re using state-of-the-art encryption and anonymizers to get information. And we get submissions by mail, regular postal mail. If we happen to find out the identity of a source, we destroy that information.”

[Corrected quotes from TED's official transcript follow] Chris asked about the recent controversy over leaked diplomatic cables. (WikiLeaks has tweeted that it was not given the documents.) Chris asks: “If you did receive thousands of U.S. embassy diplomatic cables …” Assange replies: “We would have released them. Yeah.”

Why? “Because these sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like, the true human-rights abuses in those governments. If you look at declassified cables, that’s the sort of material that’s there.”

Watch now on TED.com: Julian Assange’s Q&A with Chris Anderson. (To see the clickable interactive transcript, click on the small red text to the right of the player window that says “Open interactive transcript.”)

After he spoke, Assange spoke briefly to attending press. Some reports:

Forbes: “Julian Assange of Wikileaks Surfaces in Oxford”

CNN.com: “WikiLeaks founder: Site getting more ‘high caliber’ disclosures”

Design Mind: “Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: Troublemaker or Hero?”