Chris Anderson

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TED's Chris Anderson 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 the strange new "home computers" which had just started appearing. He became an editor at one of the UK's early computer magazines, and a year later, in 1985, formed a tiny start-up to launch his own magazine. Its unlikely success led to more launches, and his company Future Publishing grew rapidly under the moniker "media with passion."

Anderson expanded to the United States in 1994, where he built Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine, and creator of the popular games website IGN. The combined companies eventually spawned more than 100 monthly magazines, employing 2,000 people. And they allowed Anderson to create a private nonprofit foundation, the Sapling Foundation, which hoped to find new ways of tackling tough global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and most of all, ideas. Sapling acquired the TED Conference in 2001, and Anderson then left his businesses to focus on growing TED. (He is not to be confused with his super-smart friend, the Chris Anderson who edits WIRED magazine and wrote The Long Tail.)

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Blog Entries by Chris Anderson

TED, Censorship, Consciousness, Militant Atheists, and Pseudo Science!

(547) Comments | Posted April 19, 2013 | 8:18 AM

This is a response to an open letter to TED posted on Huffington Post Thursday by Deepak Chopra, Stuart Hameroff, Menas C. Kafatos, Rudolph E. Tanzi and Neil Theise.

More background is here.

Dear Deepak, Stuart, Menas, Rudolph and Neil,

We'd like to respond...

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Making Great Ideas Even Greater: Introducing TEDWeekends

(52) Comments | Posted November 2, 2012 | 9:00 AM

TED and HuffPost are planning an exciting experiment in the weeks ahead. We want to highlight some of today's most intriguing ideas. But to do so in a way that sees those ideas morph and develop in real time, in response to input from thousands of contributors, perhaps...

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Why Has TED Given the 2012 TED Prize to the City 2.0?

(448) Comments | Posted March 2, 2012 | 7:31 AM

Many of us grew up seeing global urbanization as E.F....

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18 Great Ideas From 2011 That Can Shape 2012

(65) Comments | Posted December 1, 2011 | 10:06 AM

On behalf of The Huffington Post and TED, we are delighted to invite you on a year-end journey of ideas that can help shape the world in 2012.

Starting today, we will be counting down 18 of 2011's most impactful TEDTalks -- and combining them with new...

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Cars 2: 'Car-ifying' The World with Co-Director Brad Lewis (PHOTOS)

(0) Comments | Posted June 22, 2011 | 12:15 PM

Pixar's hotly anticipated "Cars 2" is set to hit theaters on June, 24, and "Cars 2" reviews are starting to come in, so we spoke with Co-Director Brad Lewis about the worldly inspiration behind the Cars Universe taken from destinations Japan, Italy, France, Germany...

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How Web Video Is Igniting a Massive Cycle of Innovation

(64) Comments | Posted September 14, 2010 | 10:05 AM

Online video has a bad rap. Mention YouTube and an endless landscape of adolescent narcissism and mindless distraction comes to mind. Given that humanity is now watching well over 100m hours of online video every day, this sounds a like a problem. But in the TED talk we're releasing today,...

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A Powerful Wish

(2) Comments | Posted February 16, 2006 | 7:28 PM

Last year one of our TED Prize winners Ed Burtynsky made a powerful wish at TED. He wanted to find a way of using his photography to make people think harder about our planet's future.

Now you can help him do that ...just by watching this incredible slideshow, and...

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