My recaps and highlights for each session

• Day 1 TEDx Workshop, Welcome Party
• TED University Session 2 Lee Hotz on Antartica, Ron Dembo on risk-taking
• Sessions 1 & 2 cartoonist Patrick Chappatte, Matt Ridley on “When Ideas Have Sex”
• Session 3: Found In Translation Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices
• Session 4: Irrational Choices Sheena Iyengar on choice, Laurie Santos on banker monkeys, Maz Jobrani stand-up
• Session 5: Healthier Together John Hardy on the Green School
• Session 6: Different By Design Miwa Matreyek’s performance, Eben Bayer on growing packagings, plus our acclaimed performance of “Sweet Hurdy Gurdy Dreams”
• Session 7: Creatures Great And Small Marcel Dicke on eating insects
• Session 8: Adventures In Fairness Jessica Jackley from Kiva, Auret Van Heerden and Peter Eigen
• Power outage: The ED Conference Maz Jobrani returns
• Session 9: The Unknown Brains Sebastian Seung “I am my connectome”
• Session 10: Who’s the Teacher? Sugata Mitra on unsupervised learning, Chris Anderson on crowd accelerated innovation
• Session 11: The Tiny Blue Dot Jason Clay from WWF, Ze Frank, Dimitar Sasselov on exoplanets
• Session 12: Waging Peace Surprise speaker Julian Assange from Wikileaks

Other resources

• TED Blog posts about TEDGlobal 2010
• Official photos from TED
• Flickr photos
• Videos of the talks as they come online (17 as of now)
• A few more quotes from the speakers

Final thoughts

My first TEDGlobal was astounding. And that is despite my extremely high expectations and all the TEDx events I’ve attended and organized. The whole mix of genius and openness found at TED is much, much more than the sum of its parts. It will take weeks if not months for everything I saw and learned to settle. Ideas have power to change the world we live in, and TED is all about sharing them and accelerating this change. It is about empowerment. Our empowerment. It is up to us now to use these ideas the good way, or help them spread them even further as we’ll try to do in the next TEDx PARIS I hope I’ll meet a lot of fellow french TEDGlobal attendees there, and for the others… see you at TEDGlobal 2011 next year

Next, Stefan Wolff talked about ethnic conflicts and civil wars. He wondered if all the pictures of current conflicts he showed on screen were to be pictures of the past. He argues there has been a decline in the number of conflicts since the 90s, due to institutional design, leadership and diplomacy. The subject was interesting but frankly the presentation a bit underwhelming because Stefan kept reading his notes too closely.

Then Eric Berlow did a short talk about the difference between complex and complicated. He showed how it was possible to find simple answers by raising complexity. He took as an example the NYT-leaked diagram for reaching popular support for the Iraqi government. An unholy mess of arrows but as he increased complexity and represented the graph in 3D, a simpler way to resolve dependencies emerged. Nice one!

William Perrin, the ex-CTO of the Blair administration from what I understood, talked about his neighborhood in London, which although very central seems to have been deserted by law enforcement. He showed how he managed to return to some kind of local civic democracy by launching a low-tech blog, and making people join forces. He argued governments should pledge to make the Internet the first means of communication with people.

Mallika Sarabhai, who opened TEDIndia, danced and sung. Some parts of it I liked, some others not.

Finally, Zainab Salbi talked about her childhood under missile strikes. She emphasized the importance of women in wars and most importantly in peace.

This last session closed TEDGlobal 2010, we unfortunately had to leave without going to the final BBQ party because of travel constraints. Next year maybe!

Jason Clay is a VP for WWF. I thought WWF was all about saving pandas but it has actually been renamed World Wide Fund for Nature. So it’s not only about Wildlife anymore and it made a talk I had expected to skip intellectually actually one of the best of this last day of TEDGlobal. Jason explained how we can hope to continue living on a finite planet. Example of Ben&Jerry who launched Rainforest Crunch but failed. “You can’t wake up a person who’s pretending to sleep”. We’re currently living on the resources of 1.3 planets :-/ The average domestic cat in Europe has a bigger footprint than most africans. We obviously have to use less resources. Can we leave the choice between “regular” and “sustainable” products to the consumer? 1.8 seconds are spent choosing a product in a supermarket shelf on average in the U.S. 3.5s in Europe. The current proportion of sustainable food is incredibly small, we have to accelerate change. This is where Jason makes a difference, much like Auret Van Heerden does in its field: he leverages the biggest companies of the world to make dramatic changes happen quickly. He sampled 15 basic commodities like soja, coffee, cocoa, and realized that only 100 companies deal with 25% of the demand and 40 to 50% of production, worldwide!

I’m so in love with these moments when you realize that damn, if we do things right we still have a chance to turn things around. Jason seemed very pragmatic. Not the kind of person I would have expected to work at WWF at all, and I’m happy to have been mistaken His previous achievements include getting 60% of the salmon production to be durable. He’s now pressing the 100 companies mentioned earlier to update their policies, and already got 40 of them signed! He explained that Mars (yes the chocolate bars) is sequencing the genome of Cocoa to make production more efficient. He also stressed that consumers should pay the right price of products, adjusted to their total footprint (for instance the cost of water input is often unaccounted for). Adding 3 more billion people and having global resource consumption double in the next 40 years because of developing countries would mean tripling global resource use. Not possible, we have to make a hard turn before hitting the wall and Jason seems to be a leading force on the wheel. Bravo!

Rachel Sussman showed us a few of her photographs about the oldest living things on Earth. Trees, lichens and other unusual organisms, all from 2000 to 600k years old!

Rachel Armstrong talked about programmable chemical complexes, built with carbon which is very abundant and has a cycle of its own.

Another highlight: Ze Frank. He’s an artist who seems to specialize in what I’d call “crowd-art”, making people collaborate around one of his projects. He showed a few of them: Earth Sandwitches, Dressed vaccum cleaners, YoungMeNowMe, Ray’s remixes (hilarious!), Childhood walks, 52to48, Angrigami, “Hey you’ll be fine” chorus from all around the world (my favourite). Both fun and inspiring.

Dimitar Sasselov talked about exoplanets and life in the universe. We may be on the verge of completing the Copernican Revolution. The NASA Kepler telescope give us more precise tools to detect exoplanets, and to prove the assumption that planets of the size of the Earth (hence with a higher probability of hosting life as we know it) are the most common. This wasn’t supported by any evidences up until now because of the bias the old detection methods had towards bigger planets. He expects 60 “roughly habitable” planets to be discovered by 2012. Capable of analyzing basic biochemistry remotely. He finished his talk with a very interesting remark, using his tie as a ruler. Life is very small in size in the universe (the tie being the universe, life would be smaller than an atom), but not so small in time (he pointed at the middle of his tie which represented the lifespan of the universe). Well done sir!

When we arrived a minute later, cameras, screens and mics seemed to be down. Bruno told the crowd they would need 15 minutes to get it fixed and Chris, at our delight, did what I expected: he called somebody on stage for an impromptu session. All the video system being down, that was going to be exclusive for us so we were actually quite excited In the 20 minutes or so they took to fix the system 3 people came on stage:

Genevieve Thiers who I didn’t know at all sung a couple of Opera pieces without any preparation nor mic.. really impressive! Of course the audience received this performance extremely well and it seemed like nobody in the audience was too impatient to have the power fixed

Then Maz Jobrani came on stage again with some hilarious material which in my opinion confirmed his title of funniest man at TEDGlobal this year! His quote will probably go down in TED’s history : “Whoa. For a minute, we didn’t have any technology here. We were just … ED.”. I absolutely love this guy and hope he will perform in Paris sometime soon (some of his videos on YouTube aren’t as funny as what we saw though).

Finally TED Fellow Ivie Okoawo came on stage to perform one poem. She had already sung at the fellows afterparty, she does have a beautiful voice. With power restored the ED Conference ended and Session 9 began but it was definitely one of the most memorable moments of TEDGlobal this year. It confirms the fact that when you have so many intelligent and talented people in a room, nothing can go wrong

Bonus: still laughing from his set, we allowed ourselves some fan time with Maz at the pause (notice my unusually large smile…)