The TED Gift Bag

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…

DVDs…

Other Stuff…

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)

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