“It’s starting to feel like Christmas and the family is coming in,” Chris Anderson runs a conference of achievers in technology, entertainment and design. And it’s quite a family, as it includes Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate in physics; Paul Simon, the songwriter; Richard Branson, the Virgin Group magnate; and the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The occasion? The annual TED conference, named for the convergence of technology, entertainment and design— with a dash of social activism thrown in recently as well. It is expected to draw 1,200 people to Monterey, Calif., starting Wednesday.
Mr. Anderson, a former magazine publisher, took over the TED conference from its founder, Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who presided over the stage like a vaudeville showman. He called it the “dinner party I always wanted to have but couldn’t.” He filled the program with a collection of stars from various fields, like the musician Herbie Hancock, the architect Frank Gehry and the software tycoon Bill Gates.
Mr. Anderson (not the editor of Wired of the same name who wrote the book “The Long Tail”) is as introverted and nerdy as Mr. Wurman is boisterous.
Mr. Anderson, 50, has changed TED from being a party to something blending a graduate seminar and a revival meeting. Mr. Wurman’s passions have been infused with a sense of social purpose. The art being discussed is likely to be photography of genocide victims; the architecture, environmentally sustainable AIDS clinics; and the technology, water-purification systems.
And the centerpiece of the program is now the TED Prize — an invention of Mr. Anderson’s that is designed to motivate the conference’s well-heeled audience to do something socially useful. Three winners will each reveal a “world-changing wish” and challenge those attending to help fulfill it. This year’s winners are E. O. Wilson, the Harvard evolutionary biologist; James Nachtwey, a war photographer for Time magazine; and former President Bill Clinton.
Now Mr. Anderson is taking even more risks with the TED franchise. He has started making videos of the TED sessions available to watch or download on the Web free. And he has started a biennial TED Global conference that will be held in June at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
At first some of the longtime attendees were unsure that Mr. Anderson could recreate Mr. Wurman’s magic.
“Chris does not have the same stage personality as Wurman had,” said Doug Rowan, the former chief executive of Corbis, a photo archive owned by Bill Gates. “That works to his disadvantage.” Mr. Rowan plans to attend next year’s conference, after skipping the previous last two.
Nonetheless, TED has flourished. Last month, 1,000 tickets for next year’s conference went on sale at $6,000 each, up from $4,400 this year. They sold out in a week.
The elite clientele and the increasing focus on development issues evoke the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But people who have attended both events say they are very different. Unlike Davos, TED attracts few politicians. And most of the action is in the conference, not in the parties and meeting rooms nearby.
“At Davos the general sessions are nice but very superficial,” said Jay S. Walker, the founder of Priceline.com and chief executive of Walker Digital. “It allows the Arabs and the Israelis to meet quietly in a room somewhere. You’re not going to meet a Ph.D. in string theory or hear a talk about playing the lute at Davos the way you do at TED.”
If there is something evangelical about Chris Anderson, there may well be a reason. His parents were medical missionaries who performed eye surgery in Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.
Mr. Anderson wanted to be a doctor as a youth, but after attending Oxford, he wound up as a journalist, starting magazines about computers at age 28. In 1995, he sold his first publishing company, Future Network, which was based in Bath, England. He started a second company, Imagine Media, in San Francisco and then bought back Future. Merging it with Imagine, he took the whole thing public, all while starting Business 2.0, the Internet-age business magazine.
“We were pumping hot air into the bubble,” Mr. Anderson recalled. “We wrote about the new rules of the Internet. We believed in it. I still do.”
On the side, Mr. Anderson also dabbled in dot-coms, helping to start Snowball, which was meant to be an online community for youth. The Internet crash hit Mr. Anderson and Imagine hard. “Firing 1,000 people over six months was no fun at all,” he said.
But Mr. Anderson ended up wealthy. The TED conference could have been a casualty of all that turmoil. Mr. Anderson bought it from Mr. Wurman in 2000, ostensibly to pair it with Business 2.0, but actually because he had started going to the conference and fell in love with it.
“I remember watching Aimee Mullins, the paraplegic athlete, roll up her pants and unscrew her legs,” he recalled. “The way she did that gave me and the audience what I think has happened so many times at TED: a sense of possibility, that people can reach beyond where they are and do things that are surprising.”
At the end of 2001, Future sold the conference to the Sapling Foundation, a charity that Mr. Anderson had set up with proceeds from selling his first publishing company. After an overlap with Mr. Wurman, Mr. Anderson became the host of TED in 2003. That first year, he concedes now, was “too preachy.” One session had three presentations on Africa in a row.
He apologized and has worked to mix lighter and heavier subjects. Still, Mr. Anderson said he wanted to find a way to get the audience to do more than simply watch. That is what led to the idea of the TED Prize.
Last year’s winners included Cameron Sinclair, the founder of Architecture for Humanity, which helps design housing and other buildings for victims of natural disasters and for those in poor countries. His wish was to create a database of public-domain designs for use by anyone in need. With support from Sun Microsystems and others, the Open Architecture Network will be demonstrated at the conference this week.
Even more ambitious is Mr. Anderson’s plan to turn TED into a sort of nonprofit media company. In 2005, he hired June Cohen, the former editor of the Web news site HotWired, to try to develop a television program based on the conference. She found no networks that would show it. D'oh! Does anyone wonder why? No….seriously?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05ted.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin
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