VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Switzerland has Davos. Texas has South by Southwest. Now Vancouver has TED.
Canada’s third-biggest city has become the adopted home for the largest of the TED Talks conferences, a series of gatherings of thought leaders discussing technology, entertainment and design.
The annual five-day event, with an emphasis on science and creativity, was held in Vancouver for the first time last year after moving from Long Beach, California.
“Amazing,” Rodney Priestley, an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton University, said March 17 as he emerged from a morning of presentations on the latest in cognitive science and robotics at this year’s “Truth and Dare” edition of the conference. “I had seen TED talks on the Web, but being in the audience just elevates them even more.”
The annual ideas fest is scheduled to return to Vancouver next February with the theme “Dream,” Margaret Sullivan, an external communications advisor, said in an email. The TED organization has a permanent office in Vancouver, to go along with its New York headquarters, according to its website.
Staged at the Vancouver Convention Centre that juts into Vancouver’s inner harbor and was built for the 2010 Winter Olympics, the TED conference is no ordinary gathering. Delegates pay $8,500 to attend. And speakers or their nominees must submit an application to explain why they should be on stage to address the 1,300 delegates with a TED-signature 18-minute talk.
As a group, TED speakers have won every major prize awarded for excellence, including the Nobel, Pritzker, Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, Tony and MacArthur “genius” grant, according to TED’s website.
The organization also looks out for emerging artists, scientists and thinkers, seeking to raise awareness of them and their ideas before they become mainstream.
Last year’s conference, which marked 30 years of TED, included a surprise video interview with former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and a solo guitar performance by Chris Hadfield, a former Canadian astronaut and International Space Station commander, of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” song.
Speakers this year included former White House intern Monica Lewinsky on cyberbullying, and inventors of a Terminator 2-inspired 3-D printer and a pulsating vest that allows the deaf to “hear.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke on the need for governments to prepare for future pandemics as if they were going to war.
The conference is a boon to Vancouver and British Columbia, already set to post the fastest economic growth among Canadian provinces this year.
“The city has marketed itself internationally very well,” Brian Woodcock, a retired advertising and marketing instructor at Vancouver’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University, said this week. “We had Expo ‘86, the Winter Olympics in 2010 and we’re increasingly well known as a city for our film, creative and technical industries.”
Priestley, attending his first TED conference, said he was inspired to “get to that next level so one of these times I can be a presenter instead of just an audience member.”
TED talks also reach the masses, with more than a billion web views of its talks from past conferences. About 30 people gathered in a basement meeting room at the Vancouver Public Library on March 17 to watch a free, live feed of the conference’s morning session.
“This is totally and utterly brilliant,” said Amanda Levy, a Vancouver-based personal coach. “There’s no way I could ever afford to go to TED.”
Not that paying customers such as David Altschul, a Portland, Oregon-based advertising executive, are complaining about TED’s admission price.
“I buy the notion that this conference makes the money that drives a lot of the rest of the organization,” said Altschul, who said the Vancouver event was his 20th TED conference. “A big part of it is essentially sponsoring whatever TED is for the rest of the world.”
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