TED2014 marks 'The Next Chapter' with Vancouver move
Ideas and inspiration conference began in Long Beach, California, in 1984
The TED Conference is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a change of scenery — or perhaps it has just finally grown up and moved away from home.
TED has held events in over 150 countries, but when the flagship conference began Monday in Vancouver, B.C., it was the first time the main event was not held in Long Beach, California, its home for the past 29 years.
This year, TED is branding the event "The Next Chapter" with the aim of forecast the future by reflecting on the most significant developments in technology, entertainment and design over the last 30 years.
Back in 1984, the first TED conference included a demonstration of the compact disc, the e-book, LucasFilm's 3D graphics and Benoit Mandelbrot's fractal theory applied to mapping coastlines.
The next TED wasn't held until six years later, in 1990, as an invitation-only, annual event.
As the topic base expanded, Chris Anderson acquired TED from founder Richard Saul Wurman and, in 2001, the TED conference became a non-profit entity.
In June 2006, the first six "TED Talks" were posted online. By September of that year, they had been viewed over one million times.
In 2007 the world was given free access to the talks and by 2009, the corpus of online TED Talks had together tallied up more than 100 million views.
That same year, TED launched an open translation project to allow the talks to be accessible in over 100 languages.
In 2012, TED celebrated its billionth video view. Now, more than 2,500 18-minute TED talk videos, spread across seven YouTube channels, have together racked up over three billion views.
With files from the CBC's Rachel Aiello