TEDxUHasselt founder Rutger Bevers will be visiting TED Active this week. You can read about his adventures on his website or right here on this blog. This is his first blogpost:
The TEDxUHasselt conference on November 7th 2011 was a success: over 200 people applied for a ticket. However, due to our license by TED we could allow just 100 and we had to disappoint a lot of people.
When making plans for 2012 it was clear that we had to something about this. In fact, you can get a license for more than 100 attendees – but only if you attend an official TED conference. This can be TED (the original conference), TED Active (a simulcast conference of TED) or TED Global (conference in Scotland). It’s my pleasure to announce that I will be attending TED Active 2012!
Now, what’s TED Active? As I already explained it’s a simulcast conference of TED. That means it’s a conference where people watch TED live as it happens on the big screen. But there’s more: there are also live speakers, attendees in fact, who give so-called TEDYou talks, there are workshops and there are many dinners and parties to get to know the other attendees.
TED Active takes place in Palm Springs, California, from Monday February 27th until Friday March 2nd. TEDx events of one day are often called “the ultimate brain spa”. I can only imagine how awesome TED Active will be. My colleague Christophe Cop from TEDxFlanders calls it the closest thing to heaven he knows – sounds good!
One workshop I am especially looking forward to is the “Idea Hack Kickoff Party”. TED explains it as follows:
Idea Hack takes the wills and skills of the TEDActive community to hack together a service that addresses a real-world problem in 4 days. Working out of a dedicated hack space at the Riviera, two teams of 4-5 people comprised of a Project Manager, Developer/Tester, and Designer will be paired with mentors inside and outside of the TED community. Prototypes will be presented to a panel of experts from the tech and VC community. Please sign up here to join us Tuesday evening for beer and pizza in the Hack Lab as we kick off the hackathon.
My goal on a professional level is to do exactly this: designing solutions for real-world problems. Okay, a problem can be very broad: an application to make it easier to find restaurants is not really solving a big world problem, but it’s also pretty cool.
There are many more things I could write about (like the sunny weather over there), but the most important is that my visit to TED Active will allow TEDxUHasselt to become better and bigger next year. I am extremely excited about that!
Finally, I would like to thank Bob van der Vleuten and Niels Peetermans for co-founding TEDxUHasselt: obviously, without you guys this was not possible. And I want to thank Hasselt University for being an awesome university that supports enterprising students.
Oh, and one more thing: TEDxUHasselt will organize a simulcast event on the evening of Wednesday February 29th. All information about this event can be found on tedxuhasselt.be.
