Guest blogger David McQueen was an enthusiastic reporter, photographer and networker at TEDGlobal 2007. He’s a speaker, writer, music executive and youth worker whose busy blog covers issues around Africa and general personal development — two interests that intersected at TEDGlobal, as he writes below. Being very passionate about the continent of Africa, I love […]
If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary “Manufactured landscapes“, which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today’s globalized industry […]
Ethan Zuckerman blogged TEDGlobal 2007 (and several past TEDs). Every session. Every speaker (save a few). Every day for four days. His near-real-time blogging was a crucial record of this conference. Many comments were made about his ability to turn out fully formed, thoughtful posts almost instantly. Just as important, his posts helped other TEDGlobal […]
This has been a hard week for lovers and dreamers of space travel — a frequent topic at TED. An explosion at Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites spaceport caused three victims. It was followed by a report on issues of personal safety at NASA, part of the unfolding story there. Space exploration is an inherent high-risk […]
2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair’s wish resulted in the creation of the Open Architecture Network. In the five months since its launch at TED the OAN has been shifting the landscape around how architects work to create more sustainable projects. Almost 500 projects worldwide are currently be managed through the network. A number of […]
TED Curator Chris Anderson writes: Last night, I attended the New York premiere of The Devil Came on Horseback, a searing documentary about Darfur, told through the eyes of US military observer Brian Steidle, whose photographs of the ongoing genocide there exploded onto the world two years ago. They raised awareness then, and the new […]
Guest blogger Imnakoya has been writing Grandiose Parlor, offering “cogitations on sociopolitical and economic issues in Nigeria & Africa,” for more than two years, and recently helped launch the African site aggregator and multi-author blog magazine AfricanLoft. His sites have been important voices in the post-TEDGlobal discussion — which is especially significant because he wasn’t […]
Developing the ideas he laid out in his 2005 talk at TED — where he asked, “What does technology want?” — Kevin Kelly posts a fascinating essay in the latest edition of Edge.org. He suggests that we can think of technology as another kingdom of life — call it the technium. And that, like all […]
For all those who, seeing the first "100-dollar laptops," have wondered "when can I get one?" the answer is: sooner than expected. One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte said this week during a speech in Geneva, Switzerland, that a retail version of the laptop may be commercially available in September 2007, according to a […]
So you walk down the street and suddenly the wall to your left starts sprouting flowers, drawings and other animations. You slow down to watch closely, and the animations slow down, too. That’s because you’re controlling them. Although you may not realize it immediately, motion sensors and a camera have locked on to you and […]
At TED, we make a job of scouring the world for ideas worth sharing and for speakers able to share them in the most compelling ways. So we pay attention when somebody delivers a great speech. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs certainly did so when, last January, he introduced the iPhone at the annual Macworld […]
The last “Bill Moyers Journal“, the weekly report on PBS, featured a long interview (video – transcript) by Moyers with biologist and TED Prize 2007 winner EO Wilson. The focus was very much on Wilson’s career — “No one in our time has added more to our understanding of Earth’s ecology than Ed Wilson” is […]
British biogerontologist, computer scientist and twice TED speaker Aubrey de Grey has just finished a book, "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime", where he details his controversial claim that "we could defeat aging". Cheat sheet: Aubrey went on stage at TEDGLOBAL05 (video) and then at TED06 saying (I’m […]
Extending the discussions at TEDGLOBAL2007 in Tanzania and the conversation that’s currently taking place online, Ethan Zuckerman has a must-read post on the economic growth of Africa as exemplified by the very fast growth of mobile telephony across the continent — there are currently nearly 120 million subscribers to cell phones. That growth has been […]
NYTimes tech columnist and TED06 speaker David Pogue has been testing the Apple iPhone, which will hit stores tomorrow Friday in the US, and he shows it all on video, feature by feature, dressed with classic Pogue fun. Or you can read his article. Summary: “much of the hype and some of the criticisms are […]
In an extended run at the Film Forum in New York City (and now playing in Philadelphia), the film Manufactured Landscapes is in the spirit of Edward Burtynsky’s 2005 TED Prize wishes: to show the world the size, the devastation, the sheer astonishingness of the industrial landscapes we have created — and to create a […]