This year, almost a third of the speakers on the TED stage in Long Beach will be coming from a new process that opened the doors of TED to a global community of potential new speakers.
Called The TED Talent Search, the 14 country excursion taped the resourced of the local TEDx organizers and exposed the TED curators to between 20 and 30 speakers in each location. In all almost 350 speakers presented and had their talks video taped by the TED team.
Then TED shared those talks with the TED community - posting them online for viewers to rate, review, and comment on. And I'm proud to share that the TED Talent Search site you can explore here http://talentsearch.ted.com was powered by the Magnify.net platform. By inviting the TED community into the conversation - TED programers were able to get a wide range of views and thoughts, to see the speakers through the lens of the audience.
The result is that 33 Speakers from the talent search will be on stage at TED in Long Beach next week - creating a more international mix of presentations and "adding great richness from the program" said Kelly Stoetzel, TED's Content Director.
This years conference is titled: "The Young, Wise, Undiscovered" and the 'undiscovered' were discovered in large part by reaching out with the Talent Search.
TED talent search events were held between April and June 2012 on six continents and in 14 cities: Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Tunis and Vancouver.
TED's ability to balance openness with its exceptional focus on quality is an important indicator of how web video changes the way knowledge is created, shared, and filtered. We've been working with TEDx for three years, and watched it grow from it's earliest stages to a remarkable worldwide phenomenon. So, when we had the opportunity to join the TED team on this global talent search adventure, we jumped at the chance.
And now - as four days of extraordinary talks are about to begin, I thought it would be fun to share a sneak peek at the audition videos that got the most attention on the Talent Search site, and were chosen for this years TED. So, explore and enjoy - http://talentsearch.ted.com
Phil Hansen
Multimedia artist
click to view
Richard Turere
Inventor (click to view)
Sleepy Man Banjo Boys Bluegrass musicians
Bluegrass musicians (click to view)
BLACK
Yo-yo champion (click to view)
Dong Woo Jang 
Bow designer (click to view)
Kate Stone
Shepherd of electrons (click to view)
Jack Andraka
Cancer detector inventor (click to view)
Ji-Hae Park
Violinist (click to view)
Here's the complete list of this years TED speakers who were discovered via the TED Talent Search -
Adam Spencer
Ajit Narayanan
Alistair Parvin
Allan Savory
Anas Aremeyaw Anas
Bas Landsdorp
Christopher Ryan
Daniel Ogilvie
Daniel Reisel
Dong Woo Jang
Eleanor Longden
Jack Andraka
James Lyne
Ji-Hae Park
Jinsop Lee
John McWhorter
Joshua Prager
Kate Stone
Kees Moeliker
Lesley Perkes
Leyla Acaroglu
Liu Bolin
Michael Green
Miranda Wang/Jeanny Yao
Mohamed Jemni
Orly Wahba
Phil Hansen
Richard Turere
Ron Finley
Rose George
Saki Mafundikwa
Sleepy Man Banjo Boys
Yo-Yo Performer BLACK
Yu "Jordy" Fu