As we wrote last year, some of the die-hard TED faithful have been grousing about audience fragmentation and cliques-within-cliques at the conference since its move to Long Beach a few years ago. People -- especially some from Silicon Valley-- have pined for the days when everyone was stuck in the same hotel in Monterey and there wasn't much else to do except listen to speakers, have great conversations and get to know one-another.
Until this year, the only option was inventing a time machine or another conference with the same panache, A-list attendees and editorial chops. Both would take time. So entrepreneur and conference organizer Francisco Dao has a more immediately feasible idea: Rent out a hotel in Monterey, sign up for the TED live feed, get a bunch of huge screen TVs and bean bags and invite fifty of the most interesting people he can find to virtually attend the conference together. The idea is brilliantly obvious: No one disputes the quality of the TED content, it's the breakdown of the community that has some attendees in a funk. So Dao isn't remaking or reinventing the content, he's reinventing the community in the mold--and even in the location--of classic TED.
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