This week Hillel and I are at the TED conference in Monterey, California. Unfortunately I’m not a good enough writer to convey what TED is in the amount of time I have to write this (if ever). They have done their own introduction that may help. Chris Anderson’s description, “the prerelease version of heaven”, is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but not as much as you might think, at least if you’re as nerdy as I am.

But when I do try to explain why I like TED so much, I tell people this story:

I first attended TED in 2004, when my friend Joe Belfiore was invited to be a speaker. His topic was The Game–which is a whole other can of monkeys I won’t get into, but it has its own website. As an introduction to Joe’s talk, we wanted to give the audience some small taste of what playing The Game was like.

Joe was introduced as a shadowy hacker who was, for some shadowy reason, insisting on giving his talk by webcam from a nearby parking garage. Actually the video being projected was pre-recorded, but I had edited all sorts of garbage, compression artifacts, and skips into the video to make the webcam story seem plausible, at least for a while. (Judging by the groans from the audience, yeah, it was plausible.)

Joe started talking about about how he had discovered a virus spread through cell phones, and continued spiraling into some bizarre buzzword-filled conspiracy theory about his fear of discovery and the evil effects of the virus on humans. At the end he screamed “if your phone rings, don’t answer it!” and the video was cut off.

At this point my job was to cause as many cell phones in the audience as possible to ring simultaneously. (And for this, I got a ticket to TED!)

I won’t go into the boring details, but it involved the very kind people at Voxeo letting me use their production servers for a few seconds. We did get at least a couple of hundred cell phones to go off at once, and (with the help of some dramatic music) I think it did have something like the effect we wanted. And no doubt some cell carrier technicians were saying “WTF was that?” in a windowless control room somewhere.

So…after sweating about this for weeks, we had finally pulled it off, and I was feeling pretty good about it. Now here’s the “oh so TED” part. After the session, a guy came up to me and asked how the trick was done. I explained, and he sort of said “oh, I see”.

Then–in such a nice, unintimidating way–he told me what he had done.

He and his collaborators had executed a concert consisting of custom ringtones played on the cell phones of the 200-person audience. The phones were played live remotely by the performers on stage through a computer UI that translated their gestures into phone calls. To get the timing tight enough to make music they used a specially-modified cellular base station stationed at the venue. Each audience member’s phone number was mapped to their seat assignment, so they could move the music around the auditorium at will. Oh, and this was synchronized with lighting as well.

The point being: TED is not just an amazing three-day full-immersion lecture series that’s like watching PBS on extreme fast forward (I mean the good PBS, not Antiques Roadshow). It’s also a chance to meet people whose work is just at a crazily high level for whatever it is they do. Others may have different reasons for liking TED (e.g., it’s a total Silicon Valley schmoozefest around here) but that’s mine.

Needless to say, this year we are looking to soak up energy and inspiration that we can take back home to our little startup. (And OK, maybe a little schmoozing wouldn’t hurt, this one time.)