Sometimes we are so enamored with new developments that we lose sight of the simplest ideas. Embracing the bicycle as a solution to traffic, pollution, and health problems is one of those solutions that just seems too simple. But it has been shown to make cities more livable, and and certainly healthier. Jon Schull is the director of the innovation center at RIT, and has been a great promoter of new ideas around the world, but his passion...

I am fascinated by the possibilities that low-cost 3d printing creates. When I talked with Xanthe, she was confident that we could use this revolution to begin creating objects that are more useful and meaningful to us as individuals. We could replace uni-tasking, low-lifespan devices, with unique multi-purpose tools, that are customized to our needs. Xanthe teaches design-thinking at the Saunders College of Business and in the...

Well, here it is folks…the first video from TEDxRochester 2011! As mentioned in a previous article, we here at TEDxRochester HQ have been working hard to forge partnerships with various groups in the community to help “mine” for potential speakers.  This year, we concentrated on the two big universities as, at the end of the day, the legacy of this world belongs to those who come after us.  Additionally, it had been my...

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,...

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...

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...

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 am always interested in people’s migrations and life-journeys; how they might end up half-a-world away from where they started, doing things they couldn’t have imagined only a few years before. I was particularly excited to hear one of these unique life-stories as I was driving through the rolling farmlands south of Rochester on a warm indian summer day. I was to meet Ali Yapicioglu and his partner, Rick Hauser, at their firm,...