“Has Your Head Exploded Yet?” BoomTown Queries TEDsters on What They Learned
by Kara Swisher
Posted on February 11, 2009 at 11:30 AM PT
While at the TED conference last week, I asked a variety of people in attendance at the elite gathering which presentation had blown their head off. Figuratively, of course!
TED–for Technology, Entertainment and Design–had an eclectic range of speakers and tony digerati parties at its new location in Long Beach, Calif.
Onstage, there were a lot of talks about the awful state of the earth at TED, which sometimes feels like a four-year college in four days.
But there were also less-dire presentations, like the one from “Eat, Pray, Love” hit author Elizabeth Gilbert about genius, and another on how Brad Pitt’s head and range of facial expressions are now stored in a studio database for all eternity (as part of his work on the movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”).
That’s a cold comfort amid all the global melting down, but BoomTown will not refuse it.
I also got reaction from some other TED attendees to the event. Included in the video are: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Foxmarks’ James Joaquin, Craig Donato of Oodle, Mozilla’s John Lilly, VC Dave Hornik, Steven Levy of Wired, entrepreneur Bill Gross (showing off a future car) and techie Linda Stone.
Here’s the video:
And here is a video of my tour of TED action.
