Tag Archives: TED

TEDxManitoba 2012 Technical Report

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I’ve been quite busy over the past few weeks wran­gling all the tech­ni­cal aspects of TEDx­Man­i­toba 2012, which took place this past Feb­ru­ary 9th. Being a part of the steer­ing com­mit­tee for the event was an incred­i­ble expe­ri­ence, as was work­ing with my crew in my posi­tion as tech­ni­cal lead. I was also for­tu­nate to make a num­ber of new con­nec­tions and friends through the expe­ri­ence — as well as, of course, hear­ing some fan­tas­tic ideas worth spread­ing. After the event went so well, I wanted to write up a quick overview of how we pulled off the day’s tech­ni­cal aspects so I could give credit where credit is due. (Lost? Read up on TEDx Events.)

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TEDx Manitoba Participants

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The fol­low­ing is an *unof­fi­cial* list of TEDx Man­i­toba par­tic­i­pants and their online coor­di­nates. These are the peo­ple who — some­place on Twit­ter — have ref­er­ences that at least imply they’ll be there. The list was built from my TEDxMB Twit­ter List, so the “@” links and “#” hash­tags below are Twit­ter links. The Bio’s are mostly from Twit­ter as well. I have only included the speak­ers for whom I have social media par­tic­u­lars rather than just web­sites, since (a) the offi­cial TEDx Man­i­toba site already has that info and more, and (b) my intent was more toward connecting/following through social media.

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Thinking Differently about the Virtual/Natural World Intersection (TED Talk by Pranav Mistry)

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As good as most of them are it’s a rare TED video that makes you want to stand and applaud with the crowd even though you’re only stream­ing a record­ing of a past event. But this TED Talk by Pranav Mis­try has some truly jaw-dropping stuff, par­tic­u­larly for those who haven’t much con­sid­ered the extent to which we could be inter­fac­ing our dig­i­tal world our the nat­ural one. Some of this looks like gen­uine sci­ence fic­tion. Haven’t heard of him? I hadn’t either. “Pranav Mis­try is a PhD stu­dent in the Fluid Inter­faces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Before his stud­ies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher; he’s a grad­u­ate of IIT. Mis­try is pas­sion­ate about inte­grat­ing the dig­i­tal infor­ma­tional expe­ri­ence with our real-world inter­ac­tions.” He is also the inven­tor of SixthSense.

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The Benefit of Failure

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J.K. Rowling at Harvard Commencement Via TED’s Best of the Web Talks, I dis­cov­ered J.K. Rowl­ing’s Har­vard Com­mence­ment Address in June 2008 on The Fringe Ben­e­fits of Fail­ure, and the Impor­tance of Imag­i­na­tion. The sub­ject brings up an impor­tant con­cept — the fact that although we list only suc­cesses on our CVs, it is typ­i­cally the fail­ures that teach us more. Com­par­a­tively, suc­cess per­haps teaches us very lit­tle. When was the last time you judged some­one as qual­i­fied because of the lessons learned in their last fail­ure? Granted, this might not be the sin­gle best cri­te­ria, but some­one who’s never failed may well be an under­achiever stuck within the con­straints of mediocre thinking.

J.K. Rowl­ing:

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Think Differently: Electrical Outlets

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My friend John La Grou johnlagrou of Mil­len­nia Media and Safe­Plug is an inven­tor and an entre­pre­neur, to name just two of the bul­lets on his resumé. As read­ers here will know, I’m big on think­ing dif­fer­ently — not an easy trick, but one which gives you the fresh per­spec­tive to break out of assumed molds. It’s a skill that is nec­es­sary both to inven­tors and to entre­pre­neurs. At the most recent TED con­fer­ence, John gave a very brief TED Talk on one of the inven­tions he’s worked on, a new kind of “smart” power out­let that reduces the risk of fire con­sid­er­ably more than GFI plugs and stan­dard cir­cuit break­ers could hope to do. It’s an idea he and some friends arrived at by think­ing dif­fer­ently.

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Imagine a Table-Top Computing Revolution

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I see that Microsoft has come out with a coffee-table shaped computer, which represents a pretty major technological step forward in user interface (UI) design by allowing multiple simultaneous inputs directly to the display from more than one user, and even directly from objects placed on or in proximity to the screen. Not your average touchscreen. Popular Mechanics test-drives it (with video) in a fairly extensive report that includes an overview on how it actually works. As new and as groundbreaking as this is, I immediately knew I'd seen it somewhere else before.

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