TED is a nonprofit organization built upon the mission of sharing interesting ideas with the world. Today, TED hosts thousands of conferences in over 70 countries and has an ever-growing collection of online videos that have collectively acquired over one billion views since 2006, according to ted.com. With a wide range of speakers from celebrities, scientists, musicians and authors, TED allows them a maximum of 18 minutes to share and explain their important and interesting ideas.
TED is an acronym for technology, entertainment and design, which are the trinity of topics that formed the foundation of the original TED conference. Beginning in 1984 as a one-time event, the founders of TED, including published author and architect Richard Saul Wurman and Emmy award-winning broadcast designer Harry Marks, wanted to organize a gathering of interesting people that had powerful ideas to share. After the first conference was recorded as a financial loss, Wurman and Marks waited six years before attempting the conference again. Then, in 1990, the beginning of annual TED conferences began in Monterey, California. At that point, the conference was by invitation only, which limited the access of the ideas that were presented. The conference continued under Wurman and Marks until 2001 when TED was obtained by the Sapling Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by British author and entrepreneur Chris Anderson, with the goal of spreading these important ideas throughout the world.
Once Chris Anderson became the curator for TED, the organization made two important additions to help expand the reach and access of the conferences to the global community. The first addition was TEDGlobal, a sister conference held in different locations around the world. The second was the audio and video podcasts named TED Talks, that began releasing some of the content of these conferences for free online.
On Jun. 27, 2006, the first six TED Talks videos were posted online for public viewing and, by September that year, reached over one million views. By 2009, the videos had amassed over 100 million views and independently organized events, called TEDx, began to take place worldwide. That same year, TED Talks began a project to have their videos translated into over 100 different languages, and, by late 2012, had grown to over one billion views.
With literally thousands of videos on YouTube and ted.com, the range of topics span from education to quantum mechanics to philosophy, and everything in between.