The BIL Conference

You've probably heard of the TED conference in Monterey, the acronym standing for "Technology, Entertainment, and Design". The get-together is an expensive and elitist (invite only) gathering of high minded presentations intended to inspire participants, and allow direct social interfacing between impresarios from a variety of fields. I actually snuck in one year and witnessed talks by Charles Mayseles and Matt Groening, among others. It was very cool, but perhaps not exactly worth the ten thousand dollar price tag.

And so, a group of Bay Area cats have responded in critique to TED, creating the low-rent cross-town sibling, "BIL". ("Brilliance. Ingenuous. Latitude.") From the photos posted it appears there was an interesting crowd sharing good times. You've got to be skeptical about the quality of the talks, though, at an uncurated, open-source intellectual jam session. But for free, I'm not squabbling. Honestly, I wish I went and presented. Here's a link. http://bilconference.com

BTW, many of the TED talks are free on the website: http://www.ted.com