20 April 2006

Portraits from San Francisco TEDSalon

100 years and two days after the Great Quake of 1906, and 12 hours of sunshine following a month and a half of rain, about 100 TEDsters from the Bay Area came together last night to "cocktail and tasty bits" with 2006 TEDPrize Winner Cameron Sinclair, Executive Director of Architecture for Humanity. Joining him were TED Curator Chris Anderson and distinguished guests such as TEDocumentary Host and Actor Daphne Zuniga.

Spotted: TEDSponsor Sun Microsystems' Glenn Martinez; Worldchanging.com co-founder Jamais Cascio & wife Janice Cripe; entrepreneur Arch Meredith and his wife Shelly, August Capital's David Hornik; PR Maven Renée Blodgett; Google Blog Editor Karen Wickre; Universal Giving's Pamela Hawley; Technology and Politic's Michelle Kraus; Bob Angus and Zelda Rudin, principals of A & R Partners PR; and Joe Brilliant (son of TEDPrize winner Larry Brilliant of Google.org), who thanks to his moxie at TED2006, now works for Al Gore at Current TV. More after the jump...

Also attending were former Ask.com Exec Pennie Finnie, talking about her new Bittersweet Chocolate Café in Oakland and now San Francisco; Red Herring Reporter Liz Gannes and father Stu; HandHeld Entertainment CTO Carl Page; Great Dog Bakery CEO Christine Hughes and her husband Abe Ostrovsky; and Stanford Stem Cell Researcher Dr. Daniel Kraft.

Other Bold-Faced Names included Xoom CEO James Joaquin & Ecofabulous blog's Zem Joaquin; Inxight Software Founder Ramano Rao; Cardiologist and Health Guru Dr. Dean Ornish & Anne Pearce; Early Stage V.C. Robert Goldberg; Samuel Perry; Daniel Kraft; News.com reporter Stephanie Olsen; Margeigh Novotny; Television pioneer Drew Takahashi; Ross Fubini; Charlotte Ziems; Christine Campbell; longtime TED Volunteer Cate Riegner; V.C. Eric Tilenius; Sandra Yie; and William Saks.

Apple Interface Designer Mike Matas; Jan Leeman; Anne Hori; Alex Lloyd; Eric Billingsly; EBay's Eric Harkey; Technorati EVP Peter Hirshberg; and investor Brett Bullington rounded out our original cast.

TED Media Queen June Cohen showed a 10 minute TED2006 highlight video. Tesla Motors VP of Marketing Jessica Switzer, Timbuk2 CEO Mark Dwight, and Stanford Digital Vision Program Director Stu Gannes shared TED Memories, while TEDPrize Director Amy Novogratz offered a brief update on the wishes of TEDPrize winners Larry Brilliant, Jehane Noujaim and Sinclair. Trying not to cause too much trouble, TED sponsorship dudes Chris Fralic and Tom Rielly worked the crowd.

Sinclair, keeping his sport coat on for a change since he flamboyantly discarded it during his TED talk (where Sinclair personal valet Chris Anderson promptly picked it up, smoothed it out, and folded it over a table) talked about his decision to move Architecture for Humanity (and himself) from Bozeman, MT to San Francisco, the better to work with all the folks who've committed to help him create his new design community.

(A complete photo set can be found on Flickr here.)

Please email me at tom@ted.com with affiliations, corrections, omissions, links, and denials of couplehood.