During the BBC World Debate hosted at TED2008 last month, a brief technical delay threatened to become an awkward, show-stopping break. Then a heckler stood up in the crowd. As Wired's Epicenter reports: ... a voice behind me spoke up, presumably a heckler, and began speaking loudly as if he were co...

I’ve got a hip-high pile of books by my bedside, including several manuscripts written by good friends. But after Paul Collier’s talk at TED, his book moved to the top of the pile, and I spent a rainy Saturday diving into his new book, “The Bottom Billion”. It was time well s...

(Running notes from the InSTEDD update breakfast at TED2008) InSTEDD was imagined as his "wish" by TED Prize 2006 winner Larry Brilliant (speech summary and video), when he said that he wanted to "build a powerful early-warning system" which would make use of the Internet and oth...

Friday afternoon at TED2008 culminated in TED's shining moment... Jim Macgraff, founder of Livescribe, demonstrated the $149 pen-based computer that his startup will soon launch. Me want! It remembers what you write, along with the concurrent audio. A small, embedded LED display can be used for appl...

After TED (and a tiny bit of BIL), I got about as far from my computer as I could get. My friends Nate and Ari were launching their new business - Scream Sorbet - and I spent Sunday hauling coolers full of organic frozen treats and washing out sorbet containers in an industrial kitchen in Emeryville...

I am a nobody. I am not a star. I am not a celebrity. I am not rich. I am not famous. Nobody knows who I am. I have just returned home from my eighth TED Conference. Now, according to the extraordinary number of snarky blogs, bitter Twitter tweets and downright cheesiness surrounding this year's con...

35,000 words? Just a warmup. There’s another conference in town, and just try and stop me from blogging it. (Please. Please stop me before I type again…) Actually, they almost did. BIL put an announcement on their site saying they were full up. Turns out this was mostly a way of keeping ...

A work-related call kept me from Friday's first TED session, which I had thought was author Amy Tan. Unfortunately the speaker I missed was actually John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop and ILM's visual effects wizard behind several Star Wars and Pirates of the Carribean films. Everyone loved it. Da...

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session twelve - closing session.) The session opens with the projection of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" viral video based on Barack Obama's speech. The two producers are in the audience. The video has been seen milli...

(Unedited running notes from the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Session eleven.) Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing -- with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world -- since the beginning of the conference. Klust...