I made the 3000 mile journey to TED from LA with not much expectations. Having attended a number of events and shows in India, I was expecting this event to be much like others, long lines, few good speakers who would mostly fly in for a few hours to speak, networking dinner which suited booted corporate types mostly mid and some senior management, mostly tech related over some bad food. Imagine there are 900 odd delegates and a big number of management and support staff.

Hear are the 10 things you should know:- 1. Hotel Infosys: Infosys Resort (Campus) is huge and has over 15000 employees. About 7000 on projects and 8000 always under training. All the delegates are housed in rooms which are originally designed to house the trainees. However, if Infosys starts a hotel chain, I bet it can beat Taj, Hyatt or Marriot. The arrangements are top class, the staff is very polite, rooms are good feels like a professionally managed hotel. 2. Big Jumbo Badges: Normally, conference badges are in small print and boring. It’s difficult to read them while you are attempting to have a conversation with a random guy. But TED has though it well and their badges are 3x the normal size with information on your topics of interest. A great way to break the ice and super effective. The conference is well designed to facilitate networking. 3. No Sales Talk: Almost all the talks are about content, knowledge, creativity, art, talent and raw knowledge. Unlike other shows, you don’t have speaking slots reserved for sponsors and MBA types presenting their corporate decks. A refreshing change indeed. The topics spoken are very diverse from arts music, creativity, technology, economics, social well-being, a great fusion of knowledge. 4. Diversity of Delegates: The quality of delegates is amazing and in a short time you will notice that TED has the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the industrialist and the student, professors, sportsmen, painters, singers, Gamers :-) , gay, lesbians, a 6.8 tall German, quiet a few midgets, bloggers and journalists, people from traditional media and new media, movie stars, filmmakers across many counties of the world, VCs, Angel investors, CEOs, Startups, Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs.... never seen such a potpourri of exciting people under one roof. 5. Quality Interactions with Speakers: Most speakers are staying till saturday and spending quality time interacting with the delegates - on Day 1 I had quality interactions with Mukul Deora, Shekhar Kapoor (an old friend), Pranav Mistry (very humble and down to earth guy), Hans Rosling, Anil Srinivasan and many fellows. Many other delegates had similar or even more quality interactions. This has never happen before. 6. Corporate presence: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Nokia, Times of India, UTV, Network 18, Cleartrip, Makemytrip, Intel, Cisco, Murugappa Group, Infosys, Great Eastern Shipping, Yes Bank and many more Managing Directors, Presidents, CEO’s, Business heads.. surely not a show where some juniors were sent to report back to top management a paragraph on how good or bad the show was. However did I missed someone from the Reliance Group??? 7. Super cool Programme Guide: The quality of programme guide, pictures, speaker Bios is out of the world. 8. Personal touch from TED Organisers: The most helpful TED Staff were personally meeting and greeting the delegates and gave an excellent personal touch. Chris Anderson had a good interaction with me and one could see him and Laxmi making an effort to reach-out to all the delegates. Nice very nice.

9. Listen not Talk: A noticeable difference is that people are at TED to listen. Most people who are heavyweight speakers in many ‘normal’ conferences are seen as silent spectators, rapidly taking notes and trying to grasp. You can walk up to almost anyone and he is willing to listen to your story. 10. You can’t get all this by seeing the free Videos on TED: After seeing the wonderful TED videos most people (including me) thought that this will be more like live attending the ‘event’ and won’t be much different than the knowledge you can acquire by seeing the cool videos. My fiends, I was WRONG... TED is like being on a moon mission and actually landing on the moon and exploring uncharted areas... while most people think they have seen is all when they see a 5 min clip of astronauts moon walking and waving back to earth.

TED India is worth every penny and you just cannot put a price to the knowledge and interactions and networking.