Bruno Giussani is a curator of ideas. He is the European director of TED (TED.com) and the curator of the annual TEDGlobal conference [1] and of TED University. He also curates and hosts the annual Swiss conference, Forum des 100 [2]. He is a member of the Boards of Tinext [3], a Swiss software firm, and of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford University [4], and an adviser to public organizations and private companies. He is an author and frequent public speaker. He lives in Switzerland.
TED:
Bruno Giussani directs the European activities of TED (TED.com), the nonprofit organization behind the TED, TEDGlobal and TEDActive annual conferences and the popular online TEDtalks [5], and is a member of its senior team. Through conferences, TEDtalks available for free -- and subtitled in many languages [6] -- on TED.com, the TEDPrize [7], the TED Fellowship [8], hundreds of local independently-organized events under the label TEDx [9], and more, TED focuses on "Ideas Worth Spreading." Its flagship conferences, taking place in Long Beach (TED) and Palm Springs (TEDActive) in February and Edinburgh (TEDGlobal) in July are considered among the world's most innovative [10] and are regularly sold out months in advance. Bruno joined TED in 2005, and produced the first TEDGlobal event [11] in Oxford, England. TEDGlobal 2011 [12] will take place in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Journalism:
Prior to joining TED, Bruno was a well-known writer and commentator. For several years he edited the political section of Swiss news magazine L'Hebdo before becoming its US correspondent and, later, its technology columnist and editor of the first Swiss online news web site, Webdo, launched in 1995. His writings have been published in newspapers, magazines and websites in Europe and the United States, including The New York Times (for which he wrote the EuroBytes column from 1996 to 2000), The Wall Street Journal Europe, the European editions of Wired magazine, The Economist, Business Week, The International Herald Tribune, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), L'Hebdo (Switzerland), Libération (France), Il Sole-24Ore (Italy), The Huffington Post, and more. He was also the European editor of the now-defunct Industry Standard magazine and one of the founding editors of its European version, and the producer of the magazine's Global Internet Summit (Barcelona, 2000).
His former blog, Lunch Over IP [13], which he wrote from 2005 to 2008 (still available online as an archive) won him a national "Golden Mouse" award in 2006 for the best Swiss theme blog, while his articles on technology and innovation in L'Hebdo were awarded in 1995 the Swiss prize for technology journalism.
Books:
He has authored or co-authored several books, favoring a pragmatic, no-hype approach. A reviewer in The International Herald Tribune wrote that in his book "Roam. Making Sense of the Wireless Internet" [14] (Random House, 2001 and 2002; Chinese edition, Citic, 2002; Italian edition, Fazi Editore, 2002) he "first bursts the bubble of mobile hype and then explains why wireless communications really matters and how it works." [15]
Other Ideas-Sharing Conferences:
In 2005 he launched with L'Hebdo the annual Forum des 100 [16] in Lausanne, which he hosts and which is today considered the foremost conference in Western Switzerland. He is an adviser to the Global Sandbox Network [17]. He has also been instrumental in launching and developing the LIFT conference [18] (Geneva, Switzerland) and the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge [19] (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and was an adviser to the DLD conference [20] (Munich, Germany) among other ideas-sharing initiatives. From 1998 to 2000 he was Head of Online Strategy at the World Economic Forum (also known as Davos[21]).
Internet Companies:
Bruno has co-founded two Internet companies: Tinet, in 1995, the first Internet service provider in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland (then sold to Swissonline/Cablecom), and Tinext ([22]), in 2000, a software firm with offices in Switzerland and Italy, of which he is Vice-Chairman. He was the Director of Innovation of the short-lived 3GMobile, an attempt to launch a new mobile telecom player in Switzerland. From 2002 to 2008 he was a member of the Board of Namics [23], the largest Swiss Internet consultancy.
Education:
Bruno was born in Switzerland in 1964. He is an alumnus of the University of Geneva, where he graduated in Social and Economic Sciences in 1989. He was a 2004 Fellow at the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University and an Affiliated Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.
External Links:
1. The Observer: "TED - the ultimate forum for blue-sky thinking," 4 July 2010[24]
2. Financial Times: "Conference of Cool," 23 July 2010[25]
3. Fast Company: "How TED Connects the Idea-Hungry Elite," 1 September 2010 [26]
4. Speech at TEDxZurich, October 2010 (video)[27]
5. Speech at TEDxAmsterdam, November 2009 (video)[28]
6. France24 TV channel: Interview in English, 26 October 2009 (video)[29]
7. LinkedIn profile[30]
8. TEDGlobal 2005[31]
9. TEDGlobal 2009[32]
10.TEDGlobal 2010[33]
11.TEDGlobal 2011[34]