TEDx Talks
TED is dedicated to researching and sharing knowledge through short talks and presentations. Our goal is to inform and educate global audiences in an accessible way. Every talk delivered at a TED event is reviewed by our research, editorial and curatorial teams for publication on TED.com. With TED Talks Daily, find some space in your day to change your perspectives, ignite your curiosity, and learn something new.
TED is an American-Canadian media organization that posts talks online for free distribution under the slogan “ideas worth spreading”. TED was conceived by Richard Saul Wurman in 1984 as a conference. As of December 2020 over 3,500 TED Talks are freely available on the website. In June 2011, TED Talks’ combined viewing figure stood at more than 500 million. TED was conceived in 1984 by Harry Marks, who observed a convergence of the fields of technology, entertainment, and design.
The first conference featured demos of the compact disc and one of the first demonstrations of the Apple Macintosh computer. TED2 was held at the Monterey Conference Center in California in 1990. From 1990 onward, a growing community of “TEDsters” gathered annually with Richard Saul Wurman leading the conference. TED is funded by a combination of various revenue streams, including conference attendance fees, foundation support, licensing fees, and book sales. Corporate sponsorships are diverse, provided by companies such as Google, GE, AOL, Goldman Sachs, and The Coca-Cola Company. On July 1, 2019, the TED Conferences LLC was transferred from Sapling Foundation to TED Foundation.
Until 2010, the TED Prize granted three individuals $100,000 and a “wish to change the world”. Since 2010, in a changed selection process, a single winner is chosen. In 2012, the prize was not awarded to an individual, but to a concept connected to the current global phenomenon of increasing urbanization. The sculpture consists of an eight-inch-diameter (20 cm) aluminum sphere levitating above a walnut disc. TED reached its billionth video view on November 13, 2012.
As of October 2020, over 3500 TED talks had been posted online. In January 2009, the then number of videos had been viewed 50 million times. In March 2012, Netflix announced a deal to stream an initial series of TED Talks. TED Translators started as the TED Open Translation Project in May 2009. The OTP used crowd-based subtitling platforms to translate the text of TED and TED-Ed videos, as well as caption and translate videos created in the TEDx program.
By May 2015, more than 70,000 sets of subtitles in 107 languages had been completed by 38,173 volunteer translators. Speakers are not paid and must relinquish the copyrights to their materials, which TED may edit and distribute under a Creative Commons license. As of January 2014, the TEDx archive contained some 30,000 films and presentations from more than 130 countries. TEDx also expanded to include TEDxYouth events, TEDx corporate events, and TEDxWomen.
TED Fellows were introduced in 2007, during the first TEDAfrica conference. Acceptance as a Fellow is not based on academic credentials, but mainly on past and current actions, and plans for the future. For every TED or TEDGlobal conference, 20 Fellows are selected; a total of 40 new Fellows a year. The TED Interview is a weekly podcast launched on October 16, 2018. TEDMED was founded in 1998 by TED’s founder Ricky Wurman.
In 2009, TED.com began including videos of TEDMED talks on the TED website. TEDWomen is a three-day conference with speakers focused on women-oriented themes. TEDYouth talks are aimed at middle school and high school students and feature information from youth innovators. TED was accused of censoring Nick Hanauer’s TED Talk by not posting it on their website. The video of the talk was moved from the TEDx YouTube channel to the TED blog accompanied by the framing language called for by advisors. TED responded by saying accusations of censorship were “simply not true” and that they aimed to instill excitement in the audience.
Random Citizen 