TED is dedicated to ideas worth spreading. And that leaves many wondering exactly which ideas have been spread the most widely in the six years that TEDTalks videos have been available online. Here, a list of the 20 most-watched talks on all the platforms we track: TED.com, YouTube, iTunes, embed and download, Hulu and more, as of November 2012.
From education to brain function to inspiring messages to techno-possibilities, this list represents quite a breadth of topics.
It's long been said that "I agree to the terms of service" is the biggest lie on the internet. And even if you do read them, many TOS are so ridden with legalese that you practically need to be a lawyer to understand them. Also, as I wrote in a gloomy post last weekend, users have no choice but either agree to the terms offered by a web app or simply not use the service at all.
London and Paris have had a competitive relationship for a little while now. So perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that just a few weeks after London announced the rollout of free wireless access on the Tube, the French have made a similar move.
News coming from Paris tells of a fresh initiative to bring free wireless access to public transport, bringing the city's offering more in line with its cross-channel rival.
The robot’s decision is triggered after waiting a fraction of a second to observe the movement of the human hand.
Need to share your location for a limited amount of time and just with a single person? I don't think I've seen an easier method than Mapfia, a new mobile app for iOS (s aapl) and Android (s goog). Springwise highlighted the software on Tuesday and I took a closer look. All you have to do is call someone and Mapfia shares the location of both people in the phone conversation for the length of the call.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's four-year chief operating officer, has a new position -- and one many people thought she should have gotten long ago. She's now the first woman on the company's board of directors.
She'll have her own vote in all company matters, Facebook confirms with us. Board members of the public company are elected by the existing board or by shareholders (in this case she was elected by the other members).
When asked what is the biggest difference between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley accelerators, five from LA told me they're more focused on startups that don't take years to start monetizing. Leaders from Amplify, Launchpad LA, MuckerLab, Start Engine, and Originate Labs convened at this weekend's Silicon Beach Festival in Venice, California. They explained that since there's less capital down South, they're less concentrated on long-term plays, even ones that could return bigger multiples down the line.
LifeProof has made a name for itself as a maker of super rugged iPhone cases that you can take in the ocean, to the beach, or even to the top of Mt. Everest. This thing can survive in some surprising environments. But today, the company has finally answered the call for a LifeProof iPad case, the Nuud. The case vacuums against the glass panel on the iPad so that there's no front screen protector, allowing for the same tactile interaction we've all grown so fond of on Apple' tablet.
Reblogged from Fortune Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine:
http://youtu.be/N1zxDa3t0fg
FORTUNE: The low point of Microsoft's (MSFT) Surface unveiling Monday came when a prototype tablet crashed in the middle of the keynote. It was bad enough when Steven Sinofsky's embarrassment was couched in nearly 50 minutes of films, presentations and demos that worked. But isolated into a…
Not content with just the automotive industry, Ford may be moving into the password storage business.
According to a promotional video created by French ad company Ogilvy Paris (spotted by Fast Co Design earlier today), Ford is working on a way for users to more easily log in to websites like Facebook and Twitter.
The functionality comes from KeyFree Login, an app that allows users to log in simply by placing their phones next to their computers.
A few weeks ago we grabbed Jive's Tony Zingale, Box's Aaron Levie, Atlassian's Jay Simons, and Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard, and we took them to the Michelin starred restaurant The Plumed Horse. We gave them courses and courses of delicious, tiny food and lots of wine.
And we rolled six cameras the whole time.
As we've started to post snippets of those conversations this week, I've gotten emails from each of them that all say a variation of the following: …
Reblogged from Fortune Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine:
FORTUNE -- When John Hennessy became the tenth president of Stanford University in 2000, Silicon Valley was at the height of the dot-com bubble. More than a decade later, the Internet has matured and a new crop of companies built on top of it are fueling another investment boom.
Swype just announced the newest version of its type-faster-better keyboard for Android smartphones, currently in beta. The promise of the software? The more you use it, the smarter it gets.
Swype replaces the tap-tap-tap of smartphone text entry with lines that you swipe on your keyboard from letter to letter. Based on your swipe pattern, the software guesses what you're trying to spell and presents options for you to tap.
The touchscreen market's a hot one, and for Swedish touchscreen maker FlatFrog, it's about to get hotter. Intel's investment organization Intel Capital is investing $25 million in FlatFrog and its operations.
FlatFrog's patented touchscreen technology is built on planar scatter detection (PSD), which uses light to register inputs rather than the capacitive input-based technology behind most current touchscreens. This allows PSD displays to register more than 20 simultaneous inputs, not just from fingers but from gloved hands and pencils as well.
London-based investment management service Nutmeg has raised $5.3 million. Still in private beta, Nutmeg promises to help you reach your financial goals with personalized investments and long-term savings advice.
Nutmeg asks you a series of questions to figure out where you are financially and what you hope to achieve, such as buying a home, starting a business, or sending your kid to college.
NASA may not be sending anyone to Mars anytime soon, the exploration of space and beyond - though on a much smaller scale - is being spearheaded by folks like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. (Maybe you've heard of them.) Though Bezos and Blue Origin continue to work under a veil of secrecy in Texas, Virgin Galactic keeps humming along in the Mojave having recently scored a major milestone for the sub-orbital space tourism arm of Branson's Virgin empire.
"The old paradigm that I'm trying to get rid of is that space is for governments and the super-rich, and it takes years, and it costs millions of dollars, and I say this is just wrong" said Peter Platzer, an Austrian-born former CERN physicist and hedge fund quant who was in town to promote his start-up NanoSatisfi. "It's the democratization of innovation.
This week we checked out the LAUNCH Education and Kids conference, where we had the chance to listen to lots of amazing companies pitch ideas that showcase the way they're using technology to improve education. You can imagine how difficult it was to pick only five to profile.
Nonetheless five were picked. You may have heard of Launchpad Toys, the company that created Toontastic and ToonTube.
The dropouts, the misfits and wunkerkinds. The young and the fearless. They come every year to Silicon Valley. And mostly, they have come on their own.
It wasn't until last year there that was a dedicated program for them. The famously contrarian and libertarian investor Peter Thiel created a fellowship for twenty people under the age of 20. The mission was to find uncommonly brilliant young people and get them to forgo the traditional path of college.
What do you get when you put an AIDS activist, an actor and two technologists in a coffee shop? An idea to make the world a better place. Their project, part of this year's TechStars, is called Smallknot and it lets you invest a small amount into local businesses. When the business has made its improvements or bulked up its whiskey collection, you can request a gift or repayment in return.
Pilot Bertrand Piccard says his solar-powered plane isn’t as much for carrying passengers as it is for carrying a message about the future of clean energy.
Piccard and Andre Boschberg, along with their group Solar Impulse, have created a solar-powered plane capable of flying night and day, now on the final leg of an intercontinental journey from Switzerland to Spain and across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco.
The startup world is seriously displeased with the status quo in higher education. Brainworth, a scrappy startup out of Australia, is the latest to throw its hat in the ring, taking a novel approach to solving the problem.
Brainworth is a company two years in the making which aims to use a visual gaming environment to map the knowledge in a given subject for students.
Reblogged from Fortune Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine:
FORTUNE -- James McQuivey, writing on his Forrester Research blog about Apple's (AAPL) widely anticipated entry into the full-fledged TV market, had me convinced.
Up to a point.
What he says about the current situation -- except for the use of the word "failed" -- struck me as smart and fair:
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