TEDTalks Launches with PodZinger to Power Video Search
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – (June 27, 2006) – PodZinger (www.podzinger.com), the only audio and video search engine that enables full-text search, today announced that visitors to the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference Web site will be able to use PodZinger’s innovative multimedia search to browse the just-launched TEDTalks video library. TED is an annual event where leading thinkers and doers gather for inspiration. For the first time, the happenings of the event are being shared with the general public. Starting today, the public can download the talks, which will feature Al Gore, Bono, and more than 30 other distinguished speakers in a format specifically edited for a wide range of media at www.ted.com/tedtalks/.
“Each of these remarkable speakers has the power to inspire, to persuade, to change the way people view the world,” said June Cohen, Director of TED Media. “We want to make these talks accessible to the widest possible audience. Our partnership with PodZinger takes that accessibility to a new level, by allowing people the rather extraordinary ability to search within the talks, and narrow in on the precise concepts that interest them most.”
PodZinger uses speech recognition technology to create a text index of the audio, which enables users to search for content anywhere within audio and video files and jump directly to the point where their keyword is spoken. Visitors are able to take advantage of PodZinger’s innovative technology to search the content-rich TEDTalks library. By improving the relevance of audio and video search, PodZinger connects users directly with the topics that interest them and helps content providers like TED maximize the use of the valuable information they posses and share it with knowledge-seekers around the world.
“We are excited about our search relationship with TED, as the TEDTalks content is truly unique and compelling on a global level,” noted Alex Laats, president, PodZinger. “Our relationship with TED highlights one of the many ways PodZinger can work with content creators and providers to enable them to maximize the value of their content and make it more accessible to their audience. Whether a potential partner is looking to build its community, increase revenue streams or re-purpose its vast library of audio and video content, text-based multimedia search is a powerful service.”
Speakers Who Have the Power to Change the World
TEDTalks premieres on June 26 with six extraordinary speakers: Former US Vice President Al Gore (giving the talk that followed his now-famous presentation on climate change), Macarthur Award recipient Majora Carter, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, education visionary Ken Robinson, and founder of the non-profit Gapminder, Hans Rosling. TEDTalks were made possible through the sponsorship of BMW
Additional talks will be released weekly and will feature rock star Peter Gabriel on his work with human-rights group Witness; evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher exploring the future of love; X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis making the case for space tourism, “Ashes and Snow”; photographer Gregory Colbert unveiling the idea of an Animal Copyright Foundation; Seattle Library architect Joshua Prince-Ramus explaining how great architecture is made; actress Julia Sweeney performing an excerpt from her play, “Letting Go of God”; 28-year-old blogging entrepreneur Mena Trott on the personal side of blogging; and Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell on what we can all learn from spaghetti sauce.
About TED
TED is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather for inspiration and insight. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—three broad subject areas that are, collectively, shaping our future. In fact, the event is broader still, showcasing ideas that matter in any discipline. Attendees have called it “the ultimate brain spa” and “a four-day journey into the future.” The audience—CEOs, financiers, inventors, intellectuals—is almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Quincy Jones, Frank Gehry, Herbie Hancock and Bono.
Each year, TED features 80 of the world’s most fascinating people. TED presenters run the world’s most admired companies and design its best-loved products; they invent world-changing devices, and write best-selling books. They are trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. Collectively, they have won every major prize awarded for excellence, including the Nobel, Pritzker, Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, Tony and MacArthur “genius grant”.
TED was first held in Monterey, Calif. in 1984, and featured the launch of the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc. In 2001, Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation acquired TED from its founder, Richard Saul Wurman.
About PodZinger
PodZinger is powered by BBN Technologies, leveraging its 30 years of speech recognition research to transform multimedia content into searchable words. PodZinger opens up a previously untapped source of content via a simple Web search. Also, from the PodZinger site, users can subscribe to podcasts, download, view or listen to them, and have PodZinger deliver new podcasts on their own topics of interest using standard RSS feeds. So when it comes to finding what you want in podcasts and vodcasts…just ZING IT!
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| Kelby Troutman | ||
| Racepoint Group, Inc. | ||
| 781-487-4610 | ||
| ktroutman@racepointgroup.com |