TED

TED is a media organization which posts talks online for free distribution, under the slogan "ideas worth spreading".

The price of shame | Monica Lewinsky by TED

TED was founded in February 1984 as a conference, which has been held annually since 1990.

A simple way to break a bad habit | Judson Brewer by TED

TED's early emphasis was technology and design, consistent with its Silicon Valley origins, but it has since broadened its focus to include talks on many scientific, cultural, and academic topics.

Silicon Valley is a nickname for the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area, in the northern part of the U.S. state of California.

The main TED conference is held annually in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

British Columbia,, is the westernmost province of Canada, with a population of more than 4 million people located between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains.

Vancouver, officially the City of Vancouver, is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada, and the most populous city in the province.

The Vancouver Convention Centre, is a convention centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; it is one of Canada's largest convention centres.

Prior to 2014, the conference was held in Long Beach.

TED events are also held throughout North America and in Europe and Asia, offering live streaming of the talks.

They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling.

The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the most innovative and engaging ways they can.

Past speakers include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Billy Graham, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Bono, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners.

William Franklin "Billy" Graham, Jr. is an American evangelical Christian evangelist, ordained as a Southern Baptist minister, who rose to celebrity status in 1949 reaching a core constituency of middle-class, moderately conservative Protestants.

Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software.

The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed in a number of categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, and/or scientific advances.

TED's current curator is the British former computer journalist and magazine publisher Chris Anderson.

Since June 2006, TED Talks have been offered for free viewing online, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons license, through TED.com.

Creative Commons is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.

A Creative Commons license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work.

As of March 2016, over 2,400 TED Talks are freely available on the website.

In June 2011, TED Talks' combined viewing figure stood at more than 500 million, and by November 2012, TED Talks had been watched over one billion times worldwide.

Not all TED Talks are equally popular, however.

Those given by academics tend to be watched more online while art and design videos tend to be watched less than average.