16 April 2007

The New TED.com launches today Monday April 16th

This morning we are proud to announce the debut of our brand-new TED website. The site has been completely redesigned to focus on our award-winning TEDTalks, video and audio recordings of great presentations from TED Conferences by speakers including Malcolm Gladwell, Jane Goodall, Julia Sweeney, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett Bono, Bill Clinton, Jeff Bezos, Stefan Sagmeister,  Eve Ensler, Nicholas Negroponte, Peter Gabriel, Al Gore, Tony Robbins, Anna Deavere-Smith, Hans Rosling, Jeff Han and 90+ others, including 30 talks never available to the public until today.

Please check out the new user interface, listen to, watch or download new talks and create your own profile on our member profile pages. It's all free. And if you like what you see, tell your friends via email or via your blog. If you have critiques, issues, feedback or suggestions, please contact us.

June Cohen, Director of TED Media led an incredible team of people including TED's Jason Wishnow, Director of Film and Video and the incredibly talented Emily McManus, Marla Mitchnick and Michael Glass; and the web design firm Method.

We are grateful to BMW, who returns as our inagural sponsor of the new TED.com, bringing a message about its vision of a world powered by hydrogen.

The complete TED.com announcement press release after the jump...

The TED Conference Launches All-New Website

Focused on the Distribution of Its Award-Winning Audio and Video Podcasts

Redesigned Website Promotes “Ideas Worth Spreading”

April 16, 2007—New York, NY—TED, known for its annual invitation-only summit of the world’s brightest minds, today unveiled the new TED.com (www.TED.com), showcasing the extraordinary talks that have made the conference famous. With its striking design and groundbreaking video technology, the free site encourages audience participation consistent with its tagline, “Ideas worth spreading.”

"This is an important moment in TED's history," said Chris Anderson, Curator of TED. "With the launch of our new website, we're really saying to the world: We want to share with you our best content for free, and we want you to connect with like-minded people inspired by these talks. In other words, we see the site as a way of dramatically expanding our community from the 1000 people who attend the conference to millions of knowledge seekers around the globe."

TED is owned by a nonprofit foundation whose mission is to leverage the power of ideas. The new website was inspired by the viral success of TEDTalks, the audio and video podcast series, which premiered in June 2006 and has been viewed more than 8.5 million times worldwide. The TEDTalks series was exclusively sponsored by BMW, who returns as the inaugural sponsor for TED.com.

“We were astounded by how quickly the audience for TEDTalks grew. But what surprised us even more was the impact the talks had on viewers. The extensive discussion in the blogosphere, and the depth of the emotional response, inspired us to create this new site,” said June Cohen, Director of TED Media, who led the development of TED.com. “When you think about the impact a single talk can have on a single person, and multiply that millions of times, the overall effect can be world-changing.”

The new TED.com features:

• More than 100 full-length TED talks, including 30 never before seen outside the exclusive TED Conference

• First-of-its-kind video player with an elegant interface and innovative features including large-screen playback, automatic adjustment for bandwidth speed, and never-before-seen chapter-marking technology that lets users find and skip to key moments in a given talk

• A unique ratings system more nuanced than the typical 5-star approach, allowing users to describe talks with adjectives, such as "beautiful,” "eloquent” and "courageous"

• Unmatched high-resolution video that can be viewed online or downloaded for playback on a computer, iPod or set-top box

• Ideas, insight and inspiration from a diverse group of thinkers and doers, including Bono, Bill Clinton, Jeff Bezos, Jane Goodall, Stefan Sagmeister, Malcolm Gladwell, Eve Ensler, Nicholas Negroponte, Peter Gabriel, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Tony Robbins, Anna Deavere Smith, Hans Rosling, Jeff Han and many others

• Detailed talk summaries and speaker biographies to provide more context around each talk
Innovative ways to browse talks, which are grouped into TED-like themes, such as "Inspired by Nature," "How the Mind Works" and "Tales of Invention”

• Social-networking tools—including Profile Pages, Comments and Favorites—that allow for interaction among members of the extended TED community

• Free site membership for everyone worldwide

Among its innovations, the new TED features a groundbreaking sponsorship with BMW, built around the opportunity that online video affords for engaging more intelligently with customers. A homepage “Ideas from our sponsor” video helps explain BMW’s strategy for a post-carbon world, which centers around hydrogen as a source of clean energy.

“We are extremely pleased to be partnering with TED again on a venture that falls so perfectly in line with BMW’s commitment to technology, sustainability, passion and the profound experiences that the power of ideas can deliver,” said Jack Pitney, Vice President of Marketing, BMW of North America. “As inaugural sponsor of this project, we are helping TED deliver groundbreaking, inspiring content to everyone, everywhere. As evidenced by our previous project with TED, we truly believe that many of the breakthrough talks on TED.com—topics like as design innovation and sustainable energy alternatives, which are so central to BMW—will help shape our future.”

“BMW took a big chance on us when TEDTalks were just an idea, and we’re thrilled to have them back as our new website’s first sponsor,” Cohen added. "They share our commitment to ideas worth spreading."

The new TED.com was designed by New York- and San Francisco-based design and branding firm Method (www.method.com). TEDTalks are produced and edited by Jason Wishnow, award-winning filmmaker and TED’s Director of Film and Video.

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About TED

TED is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather for inspiration and insight. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—three broad subject areas that are, collectively, shaping our future. In fact, the event is broader still, showcasing ideas that matter in any discipline. Attendees have called it “The ultimate brain spa” and “A four-day journey into the future.” The audience—CEOs, financiers, inventors, intellectuals—is almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Quincy Jones, Frank Gehry, Paul Simon, Philippe Starck and Bono.

Each year, TED features 50 of the world’s most fascinating people. TED presenters run the world’s most admired companies and design its best-loved products; they invent world-changing devices and write best-selling books. They are trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. Collectively, they have won every major prize awarded for excellence, including the Nobel, Pritzker, Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, Tony and MacArthur "genius” grant. TED was first held in Monterey, CA, in 1984. In 2001, Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation acquired TED from its founder, Richard Saul Wurman.

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