TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

Case Study: Civic Intelligence, Spring 2011

Submitted by: Morgan Reisdorfer

Introduction

TED began as a nonprofit organization in 1984 with the goal of bringing people and ideas from three "worlds" together: technology, entertainment and design. Since then, the scope has become much more broad, encompassing people and ideas from business, the sciences, culture and arts even speakers on global issues. The first TED Conference was located in Long Beach, California during the spring of 1984 as an experiment that spread like wildfire. Now, in addition to the annual TED Conference, there is TEDGlobal which is the European counterpart held in the summer and located in Edinburg, UK, TEDIndia, TEDWomen and TEDx which are talks held by other independent organizations. The website TEDTalks was launched in 2007 in order for the presentations from all the various TED events to be available online for free (translations included).