David Bauer, Communication & Media. David is a journalist and advisor, focussing on technology and its impacts on society and business. In 2010, he published his first book, titled “Kurzbefehl – Der Kompass für das digitale Leben”. His current main gig is at the new paper in Basel, for which he develops the online strategy. He holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Hamburg. He twitters as @davidbauer.

Thierry Blancpain, Design. Thierry is a visual designer with a focus on information visualization, design thinking and independent publishing. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Communication from the University of the Arts Bern. He twitters as @blancpain.

Urs Bucher, Sponsoring. Urs was one of the key persons in building up Microsoft’s Swiss partner network in the nineties. After that he successfully led the sales & marketing efforts of Namics AG, the leading Swiss web consultancy from 2000 – 2008. Since then Urs acts as the head of online properties for KPMG Europe. He has an excellent network in the Swiss ICT industry and occasionally twitters as @ursbucher.

Christine Corbett, Speakers. Christine is working on her PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Zurich and is co-founder of Kliq.in, a mobile application for connecting people via personal introductions. She holds a Master’s degree in Astrophysics from the University of Zurich and dual Bachelor’s degrees from MIT in Physics and Computer Science. She blogs on https://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/ and twitters as @corbett_inc.

Ioana Dabacan, Logistics. Ioana is a Computer Science engineer that started her professional experience in a start-up called Digilent Ro. In her search for new challenges, she joined in 2009 the Hardware Accelerators team of IBM Research Zurich. Interested to see the big picture, she is currently also pursuing a business master in Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zurich. In her free time she enjoys rock climbing with her friends and dancing salsa.

Tim Dührkoop, Co-Host. Tim holds a Master’s Degree and a Doctorate in Business Administration from the University of St. Gallen. He is a partner with the leading Swiss web consultancy Namics AG, founded their German subsidiary and headed the Swiss operation until 2006. For four years he worked for Publicitas AG in several management functions in Zurich and New York, and is back with Namics since 2010. He twitters at @tdu.

Carola Ettenreich, Hospitality. Graduated in music and cultural management, Carola always enjoyed working in entrepreneural environments and newly founded projects, be it theater, consumer goods or online storage. She loves organizing, planning and keeping things together. Carola doesn’t twitter but follow as @creola.

Peter Hogenkamp, Co-Host. Peter received a Masters degree and a doctorate in Information Management from the University of St. Gallen. He started the Internet companies Zeix (Usability) and Blogwerk (Social Media), both became national leaders in their respective fields. Recently, he joined the Neue Zürcher Zeitung to head the new department for digital media. He twitters at @phogenkamp.

Nico Luchsinger, Participants. Nico is a co-founder of Sandbox, a global community for extraordinary achievers under 30. He holds a Masters degree in Medieval History from the University of Zurich and writes regularly about digital change and new media for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He also blogs (sometimes) on nicoluchsinger.com and twitters as @halbluchs.

Hugo Schotman, Logistics. Hugo will be the User Experience Lead at local.ch as of October 1st. He has worked at IT and consulting firms like Cambridge Technology Partners, Accenture and Unic as engineer, consultant and User Experience Architect. Hugo has attended several TED and TEDx conferences. He contributes to TED’s causes for example by translating TEDtalks through the Open Translation Project.

Guy Spier, Co-Host. Guy did his MBA at the Harvard Business School (class of 1993) and has a First Class degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) from Oxford University, where he studied at Brasenose College. For the past 12 years, he has managed the Aquamarine Fund.

Martin Steiger, Legal & Finance. Martin is an attorney-at-law focused on corporate law, IP/IT/media law and labor law with a Masters degree from the University of St.Gallen (HSG) and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Zürich. As an aviation enthusiast, he holds a pilot license, works with Swiss air navigation provider SKYGUIDE and published in air law. His personal website is martinsteiger.ch; he blogs – among other things – about direct democracy and twitters as @martinsteiger.

Oliver Süess. Oliver Süess just completed his Bachelors Degree at the University of Zurich in Communication and Media Sciences, Ethics and Psychology. He currently works for Aquamarine Zurich where he is responsible for investor relations. His free time is mostly dedicated to blues riffs, philosophy, and mastering the fine art of cooking good pasta dinners.

Contact

For general inquiries, please e-mail to info (at) tedxzurich.com.

Individual team members can be reached at name.lastname (at) tedxzurich.com.

You can also connect to us on Facebook and Twitter.

We know you’re already looking forward to TEDxZurich 2011 (so do we), but as this won’t be before autumn, here’s a little extra for you.

We’ll host a live-streaming of this years TED conference (the original TED, if you will), bringing you all the inspiring talks from Long Beach right to Zurich. It’s a great opportunity to get to see live-talks from TED which are only streamed by official TEDx-partners like TEDxZurich in Switzerland. And of couse, it’s also a good event to meet up with other TED-aficionados from Switzerland.

The event will take place at Papiersaal on March 2, starting at 5.15pm. Entry is free, but as space is limited, we need you to sign up for the event beforehand.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

> Book your place now

The videos from the TEDxZurich talks are now online! Above are Lukas Limacher and Corsin Gwerder showing their awesome ballbot Rezero. Below are Michael Hermann talking about his visualization of political sentiment and Reto Ringger explaining his vision of a sustainable bank. You can find more videos here.

The first TEDxZurich is over – and we think it was a big success!

TEDxZurich wouldn’t have happened without the help of a lot of people; we’d like to say thank you to everyone who made this possible:

Everybody at ZHdK, specifically:
The CAST students Michèle Ammann, Igor Basic, Michael Bekk, Franziska Casanova, Aleksandra Jevtic, Alisa Maltseva, Stefan Mathys, Melisa Muhtari, Alexandra Reis, and Nino Sartorio for filming the event, doing the webcast and working hard now on the post-production.
Martin Polasek, for creating great “opportunities to excel” for the CAST students.
Sophie Stalder and Corrado Dick, with the support of Manuel Fabritz, for creating an amazing stage design, and to Lucien Sadkowski for his support in setting in up.
Mike Honegger for a great coordination job, and for his patience when we started the first dry run at 9 pm the evening before the event.
Pascal Lampert, Jörg Schellenberg and Stephen Thomas for working behind the scenes to ensure a flawless technical setup.
Hansjörg Hellinger for always being there for us, for always finding a solution without compromising safety, and for 255 chairs, supported by Yves Studer and Armin Schicker.
Christian Burkhalter for help in printing our amazing 3 meter wide logo.
Christian Wildhaber for providing us with 100 MBit of dedicated Internet access free of any flaws
Mischa Senn for agreeing to move his event to a different location.
Martina Alfonso and her team for making sure that everybody got Coffee, Gipfeli and Brioches.
Nik Schärer, together with Eric Andreae and Susanna Rigamonti, for always finding the right person to talk to, and for keeping an eye on everything.
… and of course, last but absolutely not least, to Martin Zimper, head of CAST, for committing to us early, when we had very little in hand, and for helping us in difficult times.

Alexander Barkawi for introducing us to three great speakers.

Namics, NZZ and Aquamarine for giving us space when we needed it.

Gilles Dana for rushing the nice black Switcher TEDx shirts to us (after it took us a looooong time to collect the sizes)

Michel Bachmann from The Hub Zurich for showing the livestream in his beautiful location.

Peter Alt of Bitflimmern for setting up our great mobile website at mobile.tedxzurich.com.

Bruno Giussani, Lara Stein and Lauren Cucinotta as representatives of all the people at TED and from other TEDx events who gave us great guidance.

All our sponsors, especially:

Anita Martinecz from the Economic Development of the Canton of Zurich.
Malte Polzin from Brack.
Fabienne Steiner and Gerhard Andrey from Liip.
Alfonso von Wunschheim from local.ch.
Ben Proske and Denise Anderegg from Migros.
Nicole Blum from Namics.
Marc Werlen, Angelika Seiler and Joachim Hagger from Netcetera
Martin Sturzenegger and Piotr Caviezel from the Rhätische Bahn.
Patrick Hempele from netcloud.

Special thanks also to Bernd Oberle from netcloud for the first-ever WLAN at an event that worked flawlessly.

Cornelia Hegglin and her team from the x-tra for setting up a wonderful lunch and Apéro.

Flavia Arizzoli and Meng Tian for helping out during the day wherever we needed them.

Ralph Hutter for liveblogging the event on several blogs.

Philipp Eigenmann and Michael Schmid for taking wonderful pictures.

All our speakers: Elgar Fleisch, Michael Hermann, Jef Koh, Robin Cornelius, Nicola Forster, James Gruntz, David Bauer, Karen Tse, Corsin Gwerder and Lukas Limacher, Heike Bruch, Martin Werlen, Reto Ringger, Marco Tempest, Margrit Hugentobler, Gian Klainguti and Rachel Armstrong.

And most of all: Everyone who attended the event, or watched the livestream, and tweeted and blogged about it. You made this first TEDxZurich a success – thank you!

Jeff Koh showed revolutionary liquid Interfaces as a logical evolution of buttons over Surface and touch control. Interaction with a computer can now be felt. The huggy pyjamas were a good laugh. Urs Bucher was tempted to place a bulk order.

Robin Cornelius, the founder of Switcher was surprising the audience with acting skills during the entire speech. He talked about the traceability of product information on clothing and convinced us, that we would like this depth of information for every retail product.

The audience gave standing ovations to Karen Tse for her moving speech on how to end torture in the world. As today is her birthday, the TEDx hosts made her a surprising present.

While Karen was still siting on the stage, they played an earlier TED video from Benjamin Zander in which the audience sang Happy Birthday for a guest. During the video presentation the Zurich attendees tuned in the Happy Birthday and sang enthusiastically along. Peter Hogenkamp could only add: “Never underestimate the power of video”.

Original Video on Youtube:

My personal techie highlight was the stunning demonstration of the rezero ballbot, an ETH project.

Credits for the pictures go to Michael Schmid / @schnitzel. More pictures you’ll find in the TEDxZurich Flickrstream.

Here’s a few quotes from participants and media on how they experienced TEDxZurich 2010.

TEDxZurich has officially kicked off! Please find below the complete program for today.

Robin Cornelius is founder and chairman of Switcher, a Swiss textile company. Today, he co-owns the company with PGC (Prem Group), Switcher’s Indian partner for almost three decades. Switcher cooperates with Fair Wear Foundation, Max Havelaar, myclimate, Öko-Tex and other standard setting organisations. As an industry pioneer, the company has developed CO2 and H2O indexes for textile products. The online transparency service respect-code.org was launched in 2006.

Tell us the story of your latest project. What has been occupying you in the last 6 months?
After 30 years in textile business analyzing the development of the global economy, the appearance of new concern about the planet will require a new ethic of the end consumer. This led me to write about that on a book that will go out next spring. The idea we would like to bring to TEDxZurich is about traceability. It is important because with the renewal of technology information there is no reason that the end consumers have no access to any kind of info regarding consumer goods or services.

It’s important for me that bringing total information to end consumers through DNA code will allow him to decide with his own consciousness if the act of purchasing this product is in accordance with his values (social and environmental conditions for instance).

The impact will be global and huge.  In the next generations we will not be able to  afford any waste of resources nor tolerate any kind of lack of respect in terms of workers’ social conditions. I strongly believe that this is my mission for the second part of my life.