THE first TED conference in 1984 was such a damp squib that the organisers did not hold a second one for six years. Today TED (which for the uninitiated stands for Technology, Education, Design) is the Goliath of the ideas industry. The heart of the enterprise is TED’s twice-yearly conference at which big ideas are presented in short, punchy talks. On March 17th-21st around 1,200 TEDsters will gather in Vancouver to listen to the likes of Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte celebrating TED’s 30th birthday and thinking great thoughts. The conference has also spawned an array of businesses, albeit not-for-profit ones.The organisation has built an electronic warehouse of more than 1,700 previous talks, at TED.com. These are free to view and, so far, they have been watched nearly 2 billion times. It has generated a mass movement: volunteers have put on more than 9,000 TED-like events called TEDx in 150 or so countries since 2009. It has established a TED prize (worth $1m), a TED fellowship programme and a line of TED e-books. And it has become a central part of the world’s star-making machinery: an invitation to speak at TED can turn an obscure academic into a...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1hfH7Qq
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