Some of the best talks at TED Global 2009

Thanks to Graeme Douglas at W+K London, I was able to attend the Nokia-sponsored live-streaming of TED Global’s talks on Thursday afternoon. 

I’ve been a big fan of the TED talks for years, and this was as close as I could probably get to actually being there. Some of my favourite talks/performances: 

1. Lydia Karvina: Great-niece of Léon Theremin, who invented the Theremin, an electronic music device controlled by a player who does not actually touch it. It was actually difficult for me to comprehend that she was producing music by simply waving her hands in the air. Here’s an old video that shows her performing a couple of years ago elsewhere:

2. Eric Giler: CEO of WiTricity, a company that is researching the production of wireless electricity. Wait. Read that again: w-i-r-e-l-e-s-s e-l-e-c-t-r-i-c-i-t-y. Imagine NEVER having a bunch of messy wires under your desk or behind the TV. Imagine charging your phone on the go without requiring your charger plugged in to a socket nearby. Eric also demonstrated how that could work, and the possibilities really excited me.

3. Bertrand Piccard: OK. So there are some people in whose presence you sort of feel unaccomplished. Piccard is one of them, being one of the men who circumnavigated the earth in a hot air balloon. And his next plan is to do the same in a solar-powered airplane. He spoke of realizing one’s true potential by ‘throwing the ballast overboard’. As he said, it only took a couple of decades for 200 people to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft after Lindbergh did it, so maybe decades from now thousands of people will fly in solar-powered aircraft spreading the message that conserving energy is important for a sustainable planet, and it is possible if we all put our minds to it.

4. Geoff Mulgan: Director of the Young Foundation, who spoke about capitalism becoming more social in the years to come. Quotable quotes from his talk:

‘The only thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism is NOT being exploited by multinational capitalism’: attributed to Fidel Castro

“Take ‘no’ as a question, not as an answer” : Mulgan himself.

On another note, I didn’t know about President Obama creating an Office of Social Innovation.

5. Rory Bremner: The guy’s a brilliant comedian. His impressions of Bush, Obama, Clinton and Gordon Brown were hilarious. ‘Nuff said. 

Gordon Brown’s talk from Tuesday is already up, but when the rest are up on TED, I’d urge you all to watch the ones above.