TEDBios

Russell Davies, guest blogger

Russell Davies has never really worked out what he wants to do when he grows up.

He's been a musician, a joke-writer for the BBC and done all sorts of jobs in advertising — most of them as that strange blend of strategist, ethnographer and statistician the British call an Account Planner. While at Wieden + Kennedy/London, he helped create the brilliant Honda ads (Choir, Impossible Dream, Hate Something) we've shown at TED and highlighted here on the TEDBlog. He spent the last year helping Nike with brand strategy and consumer research. He's now freelancing, writing and spending more time with his blogs russelldavies.com, eggbaconchipsandbeans.com and a good place for a cup of tea and a think.

Jason Wishnow, TED Video Director

Jason Wishnow is TED's Video Director and Resident Filmmaker. He is directing and editing TEDTalks, our new podcast series, and would love to hear what you think of it.

Widely regarded as an expert on digital film and micro-cinema, in part because he wears so much black, Jason founded one of the first online film sites, The New Venue, in 1996, showcasing movies made specifically for the Internet. In 1997, Jason directed one of the first documentaries shot on mini-DV, Tatooine or Bust, about fans camping out to see Star Wars. In 2000, he held the first film festival for the Palm Pilot, The Aggressively Boring Film Festival.

Jason's short film adaptation of Oedipus, an epic retelling of the Greek Myth, in 8 minutes, starring vegetables, has played 60+ film festivals including Sundance, Seattle, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, and RESFEST.

Jason is represented by ICM (for features/television) and Zooma Zooma (commercials/music videos). He holds a BA and MA from Stanford University, has jurored and spoken at dozens of film festivals and new media events around the world, directed documentaries for UK's Channel 4, and been fired by Woody Allen's production office.

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Bruno Giussani, Guest Blogger

Bruno was producer of the first TEDGLOBAL conference, held July 2005 in Oxford, UK.

When he's not blogging for TED, Bruno is a writer, conference host and new-media thinker. For three years, he was Director of Internet Strategy at the World Economic Forum, and he now produces the Forum des 100 conference (Lausanne) and advises several others, including LIFT (Geneva), CrossMediaWeek (Amsterdam) and DLD (Munich).

Bruno co-developed and launched the first Swiss online news site in September 1995. He was the European Internet columnist for The New York Times for four years, and founder of the Industry Standard's European edition. He co-founded two software companies, Tinet and Tinext, and was the Director of Innovation of 3G Mobile, a Swiss wireless company. He was also Executive Producer of the Global Internet Summit (Barcelona, May 2000).

He's the author of several books (in several languages), including Roam. Making Sense of the Wireless Internet (2001) and "Storia di @", a 10-part examination of the cultural ramifications of the Internet. He now writes the EuroScan column for BusinessWeek and occasional pieces for Time, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal Europe, L'Hebdo, Weltwoche, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, The Huffington Post, and the Sunday paper Il Caffé. His blog, LunchOverIP, recently won Switzerland's Golden Mouse award.

Bruno graduated from the University of Geneva. He was a 2004 Knight Fellow at Stanford University and remains an Affiliated Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He lives in Switzerland.
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Diego Rodriguez, Guest Blogger

When he's not blogging for TED, Diego spends his days at the intersection of design and business at IDEO. He's also an instructor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka "the d.school"). In Spring 2006 he's co-teaching a new course with Bob Sutton called Creating Infectious Action.

Diego has an MBA from Harvard and received undergraduate degrees in engineering and humanities from Stanford. [Back to the TEDBlog]

David Hornik, Guest Blogger

When he isn't blogging for TED, David is a General Partner at August Capital where he invests in early stage software, infrastructure and Internet-related companies. Prior to joining August Capital, David was a corporate and licensing attorney who represented and advised numerous Internet and enterprise software startups. David has worked with such companies as Yahoo, Six Apart, Evite, Tickle, PayCycle, Ofoto, When.com, WhoWhere?, DoneRight and Sonique.

David has taught Computer Music at Stanford, legal writing at Harvard Law School and teaches Intellectual Property and Business at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He's also written for the Journal of Law and Business and The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. He was a founding editor of and frequent contributor to Actual Malice, Stanford's short-lived satire magazine.

David is also the editor of VentureBlog. His musings on life can be found on SaysMe, his personal blog. [Back to the TEDBlog]

Tom Rielly, TED Humorist

Tom Rielly is beloved in the TED community for his side-splitting original satires, which close the conference each year. He earns his standing ovations with a deadpan delivery that combines cerebral musings, wordplay, original props, and classic slapstick, including concussion-inducing pratfalls, bottles of olive oil drenching his head, or a dance duet with an inflatable lowlife woman. He also works with TED throughout the year on sponsorships and gifts.

Outside of the TED community, Tom is perhaps best known as the Founder and former CEO of PlanetOut.com, which joined forces with Gay.com to create the largest gay and lesbian online company with over 5 million monthly customers. Based in San Francisco, the company is now called PlanetOut, Inc. (NASDAQ:LGBT). In 2006, Rielly co-founded the Queer Film Blog with longtime friend and colleague Jenni Olson. He also served as Executive Producer for Olson's first feature film The Joy of Life, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. Before that, he was Executive Vice-President of Acronym Media, a high end direct marketing boutique agencyCurrently, Rielly is CEO of Griot Digital, LLC, a marketing, interactive and startup consulting firm. Clients include Canyon Ranch, TED Conferences, and PumpOne.

Tom is also an accomplished actor, stand-up comic and satirist. In 1980 he played the role of Reissman in the feature film, My Bodyguard.
[Tom's Complete Bio]
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Chris Anderson, TED Curator

Chris was born in a remote village in Pakistan, and spent his early years in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his father worked as a missionary eye surgeon. He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in philosophy, and then trained as a journalist. After several years at newspapers and radio stations, he got hooked on computers. He became an editor at one of the UK’s early computer magazines, and soon decided to launch his own.

Chris founded the UK company Future Publishing in 1985, and sold it to Pearson in 1994. By then he was based in the U.S., where he founded Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 and other magazines, and creator of the popular games website IGN. He also founded the Sapling Foundation, which seeks ways of leveraging media, technology, market forces and the power of ideas to tackle tough global issues. Sapling acquired the TED Conference in 2001, and since then Chris has been spending most of his time on Sapling, TED and the TED Prize. [Back to the TEDBlog]

June Cohen, Director, TED Media

A TEDster since 1998, June joined the TED staff in 2005, and has been focused on thoughtfully extending the conference in new media directions. She led the development of TEDTalks (the ground-breaking podcast series that launched June 2006). She also produces TED's year-round salons, edits the TEDBlog, and co-produces the conference in Monterey. She first attended TED in 1998, and joined the staff in 2005.

A journalist by training, June's been at the forefront of innovative media for nearly 15 years. In 1991, she led the Stanford University team that developed the world’s first multimedia publication. Then, in 1994, she helped launch HotWired.com, the world’s first professional website (and spin-off of Wired Magazine). So she was in the room when the first ad banner went live on the web. While at HotWired, she wrote "Net Surf," one of the web’s first blogs, and documented such historical moments as the launch of Amazon.com. She also founded Webmonkey.com, the much-loved web-developers’ site used by millions. Later, as HotWired’s VP of Content, she played a key role on a range of innovative and profitable sites, from Animation Express to the HotBot search engine. Her first book, The Unusually Useful Web Book, was hailed by critics as "an instant classic" and translated into four languages. June holds a BA from Stanford, where she was Editor in Chief of The Stanford Daily. She now lives in New York, where she occasionally talks about things other than the Web. [Back to the TEDBlog]