A New Bill Gates by Steve Jurvetson, under Creative Commons license on flickr.com.
Very cool story Tuesday in USA Today on the big, influential, thought-provoking TED conference jetting overseas to seek new and more diverse audiences. TED is the famed, invite-only confab that has drawn some of the world's gnarliest innovators and risk-takers to Monterey, California -- not far from the Esalen Institute, a famed think tank from the counter-culture 1960s. (Free spirits and hot tubs in Big Sur beget free thinking, methinks.) Now TED is growing the global franchise. The story ("Tech Confab with a Conscience Goes Global") is written by Jon Swartz, a USA Today business writer and co-author with Byron Acohido of the award-winning Zero Day Threat:
"TED, the granddaddy of all tech summits, is on a path to becoming a global brand . . . For most of its 25 years, TED (for 'technology, entertainment and design') was an exclusive, seaside gathering of a few hundred of the globe's top techies and thinkers. Al Gore trotted out his speech on global warming at TED in 2006, shortly before the issue became a worldwide cause. This year, Bill Gates illustrated the dangers of malaria by unleashing mosquitoes on the crowd . . . Now its organizers are building an international following by aggressively expanding the show (to Oxford, England, India and throughout the U.S.)."
The free reign of ideas may ebb and flow, but it'll never die, short of a global holocaust. And it sure don't hurt to award a $100,000 prize to altruistic innovators, including ex-U.S. President Bill Clinton and rock star Bono. For those who've never seen the TED website, you can view free videos of conference talks, and also follow live running notes (in translation, too) of the event. Lot of techie and non-techie brainpower on display, and it won't cost you a centavo.
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