World's best ideas conference broadcast live on Saturday 7

(Courtesy Infosys)

The world's pre-eminent ideas conference, TED (Technology Entertainment Design - Ideas worth spreading) has been taking place in India for the first time this week, and Saturday's closing sessions are being streamed live in partnership with the India Times website from 11:30am Indian Standard Time (10pm Friday PST / 1am EST / 6am UTC).

TED conferences have been held annually since 1990 in Monterey, California, with bi-annual TEDGlobal conferences held around the world since 2005, and following on from a fascinating 2007 presentation in Geneva about technology and poverty by Sugata Mitra, TED has now come to the Indian subcontinent.

The TED website itself hosts a large number of video recordings taken from previous talks, all made available for free to the public at large.

Highlights of the 3 day TEDIndia conference have included:

- Anil Gupta illustrating the innovative creative genius found in some of the poorest societies in the world, saying "the minds on the margin are not marginal minds"

- Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan promoted the use of art, applied social psychology and health education as the final piece of the jigsaw to bring drastic improvements in India's public health

- Pranav Mistry from MIT demonstrated "SixthSense" technology, which uses hand gestures to interact with real-world and virtual data (much like in the Philip K Dick book and subsequent Hollywood film Minority Report)

- Sunitha Krishnan of anti-child trafficking NGO Prajwala receiving a standing ovation after her moving speech about sex slavery and what she and her colleagues are doing to make a positive difference to children's lives.

- Hans Rosling, professor of global health at the Karolinska Institute and the man whose 2006 TED presentation suddely made statistics interesting for everyone, compared economic growth in the UK, USA, China, Japan and India and identified social inequalities as a major barrier to growth.

TEDIndia, November 5-7
Location: Mysore, India
TEDIndia's closing session: http://ted.indiatimes.com
TED website: http://www.ted.com