While most people think, the talks are the main reason for people to come, for me this turned out to be just side business. The meetups with friends from the TEDx community, side events like the Fellow program, TED University, discussions with TED’s partners like Unilever and Bain, but also private dinners with Shell, cocktail parties, parties at the museum, the castle and in caves, hikes and bike tours, cage matches and all other kinds of meetups made the week and unforgettable experience. Every day, we could almost walk straight from the pub to the. Conference center.
Off course I attended also most of the 12 sessions, in which the Ted talks were given, 12 sub themes under the main theme ‘radical openness‘ (check this amazing video). To give a quick overview of the variety of subjects of the (number) talks; a journalist who went for two years to the sweatshops in china, speaking with people working There. Her findings about the well being and mind set of the workers were strongly contradicting the standard assumptions. Neil Harbisson who is only able to see black and white colors, showed on stage his camera, which is connected with his brain and makes it possible for him to listen to colors! Showing examples of how this works with paintings, but also a speech from Hitler, blew the audience, including myself, away. but also a professor from Stanford, showing the increase in education costs of 600% over the last 20 years and her/stanfords response to that, a biological research paper co-written by a bunch of 10 year olds, a singer arranging free google handouts concerts, attracting hundreds of thousands of listeners, Ruby wax explaining why pets are happier then humans and NATO’s chief talking about open source security were breathtaking. Ted’s T was covered by Experts, demonstrating camera’s, which can look around corners, magnets, which can Freeze a object on a specific location and a crowd sourcing project of finding the best way to find gold in a certain mine, costing 500k, making 3 billion caused a deep silence in the audience. The host, Edinburg, made the week complete with its ancient elements, green environment and friendly people.
A week which can’t be described in a single blog and not even in 10. With charged batteries, I’m returning back to the Netherlands, still silent of everything that happened and with a suitcase full of new ideas! See you n Long Beach!
Jan July 2012
Some interesting facts I’ve heard from attendees or during talks:
– Every hour, new York is producing enough waste to build Nother statue of liberty
– TEDx events are even being held at china’s great wall, in a prison, on the amazon and more amazing places.
– over 17000 TEDx talks are already online!
– CERN is working together with roxio on an own version of angry birds, strongly linking to cern’s work.
– the director of DeWar whiskey told me that 10% of whiskey gets lost when ripping on a vat
– at the extremely large event SXSW, placing chips in the badges of attendees, is giving the organization the possibility to see in which area more security or bar employees are needed.
– only 60% of the vergaarde wind energy is being used for its intended purpose – credit card fraud amounts to 2 billion dollar last year
