So, what is TED? And, more important, why should I care?
For 22 years, Ted was a conference, an exclusive ideas forum where the great and the good came to hear Al Gore talk about climate change and Bill Gates about computing, right up until four years ago, when TED Talks was launched online and promptly became an internet sensation. It's a bit like YouTube, but instead of featuring cats falling into lavatories, it has short, cutting-edge talks by the world's leading neuroscientists, behavioural economists, video artists, philosophers, particle physicists, rocket scientists, endurance athletes, Aids researchers… you name it, it's been at TED.
What TED does is seek out the most interesting, unusual and potentially groundbreaking ideas on Earth and then provide a platform to share them with the world. At the heart of it all are the conferences. The main event takes place once a year in Long Beach, California, and in a week's time the new, annual TED Global conference will take place in Oxford. It's a smaller, more intimate affair – 700 delegates (it's 2,000 at Long Beach) listening to 50 speakers over four consecutive days.
