Last Saturday, a friend and I attended TEDxMadrid, an independently organized TED event in which several speakers presented some “ideas worth spreading” as the TED slogan goes.
The event took place in HUB Madrid, a “unique ecosystem designed to enable individuals ranging from corporate executives to community leaders, from policy-makers to entrepreneurs and freelance professionals to thrive. It is an office and events space where you can access social business ideas, innovation, knowledge, market opportunities, inspiration and experience” as they put it.
The event was streamed and the videos so far are available here. It was also funny to see the twitting activity that took place among the people being at the meeting (check #tedxmad, #tedxmadrid…).
A summary of each talk was made in the form of sketch boards by Puño & Gorriti that are available in flicker.
At the end of the event there was a short performance of impromptu theatre by “Impromadrid Teatro”, it was a funny experience. I have a friend who also has an impromptu theatre company in Madrid, “Impronta Compañía de Teatro Espontáneo”, I must go to one of their performances!
I still have to mentally “re-work” many of the things we heard and saw, and look for the many webs, books and ideas that were raised. Nevertheless, in this post I already wanted to share some thoughts that I took with me:
- Slavery. It was commented by Antonella that in the last TED she learnt about “Free the Slaves”, an organization that liberates slaves around the world… slaves in the XXI century? We hear about women obliged to work as prostitutes or children working in some hidden factories… but when I heard the figure 27 million of them, I was shocked.
- To be exponential in our thoughts. Alberto Dubois showed in his talk how evolution is exponential (human evolution, computing evolution, genome decoding evolution…) but we are normally linear in our thinking. We may apply the “exponential” way of thinking to many other fields, think of it.
- BRINKs. We all have heard about the BRICs (the term coined by Goldman Sachs to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China) or the PIGS (the term coined by Anglo-Saxon economists, used by FT, to refer to Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain – lately Ireland and Great Britain as well), Alexander van de Putte introduced the BRINKs. This term refers to Brazil, Russia, Iraq, Nigeria and Kazakhstan, the countries which increased oil production will defer (once again) the estimates for the peak oil.
Finally, I wanted to thank C. Todd, Javier, Derek and Antonella for the great effort they have put into this event.
For those of you who could not attend this event but would have wished to do so, be aware that a similar event will take place in a month from now in Madrid, TEDxSol, on October 5th.
The Blog by Javier 