The TED Gift Bag

TED conferences are famous for the complimentary gift bag distributed to each delegate upon registration.

Not
only are the bags replete with politically/ecologically-correct goodies,
but the bags themselves aren't your usual cheap-ass branded schwag, but
sourced from the likes of Timbuk2 and Rickshaw Bagworks…this year, TEDsters got very cool (and very large) Zero Messenger. 

So what's in the bag?

Books…

• The Idea Book
• The Way Of Nowhere
• You Are Really Rich And You Just Don't Know It Yet
• TEDGlobal 2009 Speakers Guide
• The Way Of Nowhere

DVDs…

• Do The Green Thing
• Pole To Pole
• Slumdog Millionaire
• The End Of The Line

Other Stuff…

• A one-year subscription to Ode Magazine
• A Clif bar
• Arup's Drivers Of Change
• Bliss' Sink Side Six-Pack
• KOR One 'hydration vessel' – very cool, kinda like an 'iPod for water'
• Pharox III LED lightbulb

Every night, returning to my hotel room, I'd find a schedule for the next day, along with a little gift – a copy of The Dodo Guide To Oxford, sometimes a box of Vosges Peanut Butter Bonbons or Hazlenut Bombalinas, Mari's brownies, and most impressively/embarrassingly an N97 couriered to me for live-blogging, by my sponsors Nokia; embarrassing because I can't use it without an iPhone SIM removal tool to flip out my SIM into the N97…

Over at Keble College, Toms Shoes
were giving away complimentary pairs of their (very weird looking)
footwear to all TEDsters; for every pair collected by a delegate,
another would be donated to a child in need. So, Gordon Gekko was kinda right? Speakers get to pickup a Livescribe and (um) a pair of UGG slippers and Knome are offering a selected few TEDsters the possibility of sequencing their personal genomic data – neat!

So the TED gift bag is very 'right-on', speaking to ecological, creative and innovative motivations. I can't help but wonder if – assuming David Deutch's parallel universes theory hold – that there's an evil twin for the TED gift bag, containing DVDs of hardcore porn, Jeffrey Archer novels, a filament lightbulb, a bottle of Evian, pack of cigarettes, a hand grenade, a copy of Windows Vista and keys to a Hummer.

I'm hoping when I check-in to the pearly gates sometime around 2069 there'll be a gift bag with a Qu'ran, some holy water, a prayer mat and seventy-two virgins…oh and some Five Fingers 🙂

(woah, this post reads like a product placement singularity)