One of the highlights for us each year is our continuing partnership with the folks at TED, and being able to bring creative projects and technology to attendees at TEDActive. Last year, we sponsored the first-ever official hack-a-thon at a TED conference, uniting a TED Fellow with hacker-entrepreneurs from all over the U.S. which resulted in the creation of several apps that help children with asthma.
The theme of this year’s conference is “The young. The wise. The undiscovered.” With that in mind, we thought we’d dig a little deeper into the realm of discovery and explore what the young and the wise might have to share with the wider world. While not everyone has the opportunity to see the TED Talks in real-time, there are plenty of people out there that might want to be part of the conversation and the experience. And that’s actually a close analogy of what many of us use search to do: interact with times, places, and bodies of knowledge that we didn’t experience directly. So our project at TEDActive this year is about that search for knowledge, helping TED share that knowledge it creates with the goal of helping them get another billon views.
To that end, we partnered with Microsoft Research’s FUSE Labs, creators of a Bing-powered technology called So.cl, and built a special area of this research platform for TEDActive attendees, available at TED.so.cl. Here, conference-goers can assemble images, research links, videos, and text into collages that express their reactions and associations around the TED Talks. Once completed, attendees can share their collages not only with those at the conference, but with anyone who wishes to view the real-time, online feed. We are also bringing along two citizen journalists to observe and help others record their own collages– Chris Morrow, an iCNN iReporter and Daniel Brusilovsky, founder of Teens in Tech Labs.
In addition to the collages attendees create on their own devices, the truly geeky can stop by the Bing space to watch the talks and use Microsoft Surface Pros, as well a jumbo touch screen (82 inches). And, because being at TEDActive means being at the intersection of knowledge and fun, we’ll be printing the collages on giant construction blocks. We have no idea what attendees will build out of their TED experiences (Collage Castle, anyone?!?), but knowing the unique flavor of the TEDActive audience, we’re confident it will be awesome.
So remember to follow along at TED.so.cl.
– The Bing TEDActive Team (Matt Wallaert, Betsy Aoki, Stefan Weitz)
