Headline, January05, 2014

''' ALL THE WORLD'S : A STAGE '''

Most elementally it attracted the world's biggest nerds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Yahoo! boys, the Google boys and everybody else who ever made a billion dollars.

They in turn attracted the Hollywood royalty, who in turn attracted the media moghuls. If there was a theme at TED's, then it was  ''insider-ism''. Everybody present was somebody.

For several dotcom years, TED was the main driver of many people's social life. The tech business was the mafia and TED was the biggest Mafia wedding of the year.

A key feature and sought-after invitation at TED, hosted on the second night by the literary agent John Brockman, is the  ''Billionaires Dinner'' -row upon row of the world's most successful and richest human beings.

''Murdoch though, in my first conversation with him at TED, was grouchy about some people who were implying they were billionaires who, according to him, were most definitely not!'' writes the author.

''Here's my favourite TED scene : Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, when Google wasn't Google but just a promising technology, being shown a billionaire's 757 and, in some scary and spontaneous expression of their own destiny:

Whopping as they ran up and down the aisles  - a few years later they bought a similar plane for themselves. Of note, Brin and Page then sat on the plane with the billionaire and described 

How one of their ideas for developing the Google brand was to market a line of underwear   -Google bras would work especially well, they thought, because of the double  ''O''  in Google.

TED was the happenstance creation of one Richard Saul Wurman, among the odder people I've ever met. Wurman now 75+ is an architect, graphic designer, publisher, writer, and jack-of-all-trades media entrepreneur who was never taken very seriously in New York.

He coined, the phrase  -''information anxiety''- and published the Access travel book series, -so he went out to the west coast. He was, too, an incredible Hustler, and talker, and sentimentalist  -there was always a moment at TED, widely anticipated-

When Wurman would cry on stage  -and social facilitator. He was exactly what Silicon Valley needed: an official greeter and emoter for all the shy boys.

He was also, in this land of new media, an incredibly old-fashioned showman. He was an impresario. A vaudevillian practically. At other conferences, the nerds would be put on stage and stumble through their dreadfully boring presentations.

Wurman rehearsed everybody. He imposed strict rules: no reading from the script, no PowerPoint, no self-promotions.

Wurman a Buddha-like figure with beard and signature sweater, would sit on the edge of the stage monitoring each performance. And he understood something about the importance of lightening. This wasn't a conference really   -this was the theater.

And here was another Wurman innovation: technology conference were famous freebies   -everybody was always a friend of somebody's-, but Wurman made everybody pay. He shamed people in coming to TED, then shamed them into paying for doing him the favour of coming.

And the sums added up: 700 people at TED x £ 3,000 = £2.45m.

Wurman was scrupulous about never paying performers, and, but for the occasional aide of one of his sons and teams of volunteers, running the whole thing by himself, which facilitated the purchase of a waterfront mansion in Newport, Rhode Island:

One of those ungainly, ridiculous places with an accountable number of bedrooms, erected by the American railroad robber barons at the end of the 19th century. 

But Wurman, the TED millionaire, wanted even more. And in 2001, just as the tech bubble was bursting, he managed to sell the whole damn conference for a reported £4.2m to Chris Anderson, a British journalist who had successfully started computer magazines in the U.K and, less successfully in America.

Anderson seemed to be an incredible dupe. Everybody knew Wurman was trying to sell the conference to anybody who would listen to his pitch. There was hardly anybody who went to TED who Wurman didn't try to sell the conference to, -but with only Anderson stepping up.

The Honour Post continues:

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Denmark. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' The Network Of Influence '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless