TED Fellows

The Fellows Program is aimed at the next generation of TEDsters--up-and-comers with great ideas on the brink of changing the world. Their presentations were amazing--even though they only had three minutes to tell their stories.

Tom Rielly is the perfect moderator, too, drawing hilarious connections between the various topics: mango-washing macaques and twitter, slow food and microbial fuel cells.

Speaking of microbial fuel cells, here's a sample of what I mean by on the brink of changing the world: Ashish Patra is in his first year at Penn. He spent last summer improving on the work of researchers who employ microbes feeding on waste to generate fresh water and electricity. Like, a 250% improvement in power generation, and using lower-cost and sustainable materials in the process.

Ideas like this are rife: a few others that caught my attention:

Question Box. Ever wonder what we did before Google? Yeah, most of the world doesn't have a Google. But they could have a low-tech, low bandwidth mechanism to ask questions in their native language and get an answer.

CellBazaar: Want to sell your crop/catch/craft but don't have a computer and don't speak English? CellBazaar is the mobile answer to eBay+Priceline+Craigslist.

Incubator Bag: More infants than you want to think about die every year due to an inability to keep them warm. In the developed world, incubators largely solve this problem, but they're costly and require electricity--not always guaranteed other places. The incubator bag uses a wax polymer insert that can be heated in water to keep the kids warm for hours at a time.

Then there was the final presentation, which posited the question, "Were ancient civilizations just as crappy as ours, and do we only not know that because they didn't have facebook and twitter?" In other words, do we glorify past civilizations because we have no record of how much time they wasted paying attention to celebrities and gossip? Hilarious.


Oh. I got to hold the stage, too. After the Fellows finished, I spent an hour presenting on presentations. Kinda meta. Got great feedback and made some very interesting new friends.