Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the 
So you arrive at the TED conference in Monterey (background) a few hours before it starts and go to the registration desk and while you wait in line to pick up your badge you start networking - because lining up with you are many people you know, kindred souls you've met here in the past or at other conferences, business partners from various parts of the planet, or just friends. Son in a few minutes I catch up with Bill Liao, the founder of openBC, who's in from Zurich; columnist and author Arianna Huffington; British polar explorer Ben Saunders; actress Daphne Zuniga; Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick; and Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity. It's a festive moment. The sun is shining and the general mood is very good (except for the staff running around taking care of the last-minute fixes) and the program of the next four days looks like a festival of ideas and creativity, sprinkled with moments of aesthetic pleasure and, of course, pure fun.
Once you've picked up your badge, and a free coffee (courtesy of Google), you move on to the next station: exchange your voucher for a gift bag.
Although it can't obviously compare with the Academy Award gift bags (where companies would hang their CEO to put a new cell phone in the hands - or a pair of design glasses on the nose - of stars and wannabe stars), the "TED gift bag" is famous in tech conference circles for the wealth of presents it contains: no surprise many other events are copying the idea. It actually starts with the bag itself, which is a high-quality messenger bag with computer compartment from Timbuk2, built based on the cradle-to-cradle specifications (that's a new "sustainability" product design paradigm - a book in the bag explains it). The bag contains the conference's program booklet, which opens with a quote from Jacques Cousteau: "If we were logical, the future would be bleak. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work". The bag also contains thirty or forty other goodies including: Himalaya-grown green tea and Nicaragua-grown coffee; a book on the theory of music, another on the oil crisis, a third on spirituality; a USB drive; Ethel and SixDegrees music CD and a few DVDs and videogames; lots of software from Jambo, Serious Magic, Quicken, Real Networks, etc; lots of gift certificates (free subscriptions to magazines such as Discover or services such as Shutterfly, discounts on buying gadgets or a Lexus car); and - and - the bullseye plush dog from Target, dressed in a red TED t-shirt, which will be a genuine pleasure to carry on the flight back...
Next stop (after you have dropped off all this in your hotel room): IntroNetworks. That's a "community" feature on the TED website that lets you - as soon as you're registered for the conference - set up your profile and contact other participants and so on. It's quite effective, easy to use, and visually compelling: in one of the displays, other attendees show up as "pins" around you, with the closest sharing at least part of their profile with yours. Click on the pin to see their profile and contact them:
And then there is the pre-conference press: the San Francisco Chronicle has a long story by Tom Abate on TED today. Here is the closing paragraph:
The event dares to stretch the mind with topics that occasionally seem, well, flighty. That includes Thursday's scheduled appearance by Einstein, the talking parrot... The conference schedule says Einstein - a she incidentally - is "keeping the content of her TED talk a deep secret."
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