Odysseus…Gauguin…Robinson Crusoe…and me? Many people dream of the ultimate escape: throwing all the baggage of civilization away and taking off to live on a remote island. But few people—particularly professional couples with young kids—actually go through with it. And yet, that’s just what my family did: we left Boston, and my reliable job at a […]
TED.com volunteers translate talks into many languages, from commonly used (like Spanish and Mandarin Chinese) to a few less expected (like Klingon). And two new languages just joined our library: Latgalian and Tatar. Latgalian is officially the 104th language on TED.com. It’s spoken in Latgale, a region in the eastern part of Latvia, by […]
Hannah Brencher strolled onstage to give her TED Talk, “Love letters to strangers,” with a US Postal Service mail crate propped on her hip. And that mail crate full of letters turned out to be a metaphor for what happened next — a box of surprises and possibilities. Onstage at Joe’s Pub in June 2012, […]
TEDx organizer Seema Raman has held three events in the past year, and traveled from her home in Bangalore to the snowy mountains of British Columbia to learn more about putting on great events. But the funny thing is: Raman never intended to organize anything at all. Raman, a 20-year-old engineering student at PES Institute […]
Fun: it comes in many shapes, sizes, temperatures and forms. What does fun mean to you? We are creating a crowdsourced video about what fun looks like all over the world, and would love to see your contribution! This week, take a few minutes to make a video of fun in action and send it […]
A crumbling former asylum, a massive brick power station, and an alternative community built by hand by a river. In the hours before TEDBerlin Salon kicked off, three TED Fellows led conference attendees on a treasure hunt through the sprawling streets of sunny Berlin to these locations. Guided by the mobility app Moovel — which recommends the most effective […]
From new TEDx director Jay Herrati: There are many great ways to start a new job. But I have experienced none quite as good as meeting hundreds of people—from all corners of the globe—who are extremely passionate about improving their communities through big ideas. When I accepted my new role as director of the TEDx […]
Step with me for a minute into an internet time machine. The date: June 27, 2006. The event: the first six TED Talks being posted online. “Today, for the first time ever, we’re thrilled to present some of the most remarkable talks from TEDs past,” reads a blog post from Chris Anderson written on that day. (The […]
Yesterday, nearly every seat of the theatre at the Admiralspalast was filled for the TEDBerlin Salon, the first official TED event in Germany (and, with TEDGlobal’s move to Rio in October, the only one taking place in Europe this year). In two sessions hosted by Bruno Giussani, 15 speakers and performers covered an eclectic array of topics, whizzing from tech-driven social […]
In the video above, get to know the 20 newest TED Fellows, who are joining our global network of 300+ innovators who color far outside the lines. This class of Fellows, who will be attending TEDGlobal 2014, represents 16 countries as well as bold ideas in photography, healthcare, food distribution, conservation, street art and, well, you name […]
This wow of a video premiered today in Berlin at the first TEDSalon in Germany. Filmmaker Christopher Kippenberger, a pioneer in using drones, asked artists and independent filmmakers to pick a Berlin landmark and use camera-equipped drones to capture it on video. Some of them flew the aircraft daringly over places that have never been […]
Earlier this month, the Queen announced legislation to clamp down on corporate secrecy in her speech at the opening of Parliament in the United Kingdom. This may be news to the rest of the world, but it was a hard-won victory for the campaigners at Global Witness, an international non-governmental organization known for hard-hitting field investigations […]
Several members of the TED community appeared in the news this week. Below, some highlights: Yesterday marked the first-ever White House Maker Faire, which brought together 100 students, entrepreneurs, engineers and tinkerers from across the country. A 17-foot robotic giraffe attended, as did TED Fellows Jane Chen, David Lang, Manu Prakash and Jose Gomez-Marquez, plus […]
TEDGlobal 2014 will be held in Rio de Janeiro from October 5 through 10. With a speaker program that ranges from a nomadic filmmaker to a Buddhist monk, from a technologist changing the way we detect cancer to a chef who’s preserving the culinary heritage of Brazil, the conference promises to flip our thinking many […]
On June 17, 2014, US president Obama pledged support to create 700,000 square miles of new Pacific Ocean “hope spots” — no-fish, no-drill zones to help the ocean recover. As Sylvia Earle asked in her 2009 TED Prize wish:
I wish that you would use all means at your disposal — films, expeditions, the web, new submarines — and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas — hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. How much? Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. You decide: how much of your heart do you want to protect?
When you watch a TED Talk, you see a speaker on a stage sharing a big idea. But for us in TED’s post-production department, we see each talk as the final product of a complex recipe. The speaker and their words are the most important ingredient, of course. But there are other, less-obvious ingredients in […]