Jen Indovina is a green tech entrepreneur, political energy advisor, and TED Fellow who is currently working to spread energy efficiency initiatives worldwide. Jen is the CEO of Tenrehte Technologies, a clean tech company that produces wireless power management products. She was previously the Director of Marketing for Vivace Semiconductor where she led global technical marketing, sales, and customer engineering teams based in the US,...

An accomplished musician, composer and author, Ramon Ricker is Senior Associate Dean for Professional Studies, Director of the Institute for Music Leadership and Professor of Saxophone at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York; where he has been a faculty member since 1972. Throughout his long and varied career, Dr. Ricker has straddled the chasm between the “Ivory Tower” of academia and the “Real World”; building a...

Jim is the Communications Manager of COOL Rochester, a volunteer organization committed to educating homeowners in ways to reduce their energy usage. For the last half of his life, he heard rumblings of the coming global warming, but he was convinced that it would not be a problem for him or his children, or even grandchildren. In 2007, Jim watched the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and it became apparent to him that the problem of...

I found out about the Museum of Kids Art thanks to a bumper sticker I saw in a parking lot one day(turns out it was Michelle Cardulla’s car.) I followed up on it and thought the concept looked really cool just from browsing their website. Then, I met Michelle. MOKA (not to be confused with our other Moka, Lantum) is a fantastic program that I would love to see expanded not just across the city, but the entire country. Michelle has...

Let me warn you first: if you have children, this talk is going to touch you deeply. After the first meeting we had with Ralph, I went home and hugged my two year old daughter hard. What Ralph has to teach us about lead poisoning is terrifying primarily because it’s new information to a lot of people. I always had this vision of what lead poisoning is and what the cause is. I would have never guessed how wrong I truly was. Ralph...

Complementing Almeta opening the event, we were brought back from lunch by Shanterra Randle. A local slam poet and activist, Shanterra’s been a powerful force working for the youth in the city of Rochester for the last few years. I was honored to finally meet her at our event, and she renewed my hope in our future with young people like her leading the way. Shanterra returned at the end of the day with some final...

When I first filled out the application to be the TEDxRochester licensee (seems like a lifetime ago!), I needed to tell them a little bit about our community. I gave them the standard stories about our Fortune 100 company population, our innovative citizens and their contributions, our world class colleges and universities, etc, etc. But, I ended it with “Even our local supermarket chain, Wegmans, is a world-leader! Chains from...

Hailing from Cameroon, Moka is a man of many talents. Not least of these is his passion: building affordable, eco-friendly homes using little more than the earth available at the build site. I haven’t had the chance to check out the eco-dome he’s built here in Rochester, but Gary did, “You’re driving down this urban city street and then you’re immediately on Tatooine.” The technology is cool, and the...

As someone who never really “got” art, Darren’s talk was a liberating experience for me. Speaking as a member of the artistic elite, he reminds us that art is supposed to be something unique to every individual; not just in the creation, but the viewing as well. Thanks to our “there’s only ever one right answer” educational system, we forget that some things are meant to be subjective and to force...

As a science geek, TED’s primary draw for me is the innovators and researchers. As a Rochester-based TEDx, with lots of research facilities in the area, we have so many choices we could put up on our stage. Ben Miller’s work is as awesome as it is potentially world-changing. Ben starts off telling us that he views the adage of “work before play” as being over. He introduces us to new memes starting with...

Karlie’s passion is open source technologies and what they mean to our future. In this talk, she brings up some very overlooked and important ideas. Too often, the talk around technology education is centered around white collar work and its accessibility to those from the lower socio-economic brackets. But, as Karlie shrewdly points out, technology has become so ubiquitous that technological illiteracy will present a significant...

I got to meet Almeta for the first time on the night of our rehearsals. She did the song of welcome you’re about to hear for us without a mike and she filled the room. Almeta is a force of nature, one that is full of joy and hope and I consider myself so much better for knowing her. As 9AM rolled up, I let her know it was time for her to begin by simply telling her “Almeta…please wake these people up!” And, she in no...

We’ve finally got the last batch of videos for you and I’ll be putting them up as soon as I can! This next set is the third session which occurred after everyone had a lovely lunch and a good long while to mingle about with others in the lobby. They shared ideas and stories with those they’d met. These talks speak to the youth of our beautiful city: their past, their present and their futures. Shanterra...

One drawback to hosting TEDxRochester in the beginning of November is once the conference is over, you head smack into the holidays with all of the traveling and family-based insanity that implies. We’re working to get the videos to you as soon as possible, but for now here’s the next set to carry you through the new year. Darren Stevenson As someone who never really “got” art, Darren’s talk was a liberating...

What a fantastic event TEDxRochester 2010 was! Event now, it’s three weeks later, and I’m still reeling from what an awesome time we all had. The speaker lineup we put together was top notch, and now you get to see the first set for the first time if you missed the event itself. We broke the day up into four hour long sessions which had half hour breaks between each (except sessions 2 & 3 which had the hour lunch). ...