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TED Conference Moving To Vancouver, Whistler In 2014

TED Coming To Canada
TED

The influential TED Conference is coming to Vancouver starting in 2014, conference organizers announced on Monday morning.

The conference holds two keynote events, one in Long Beach, Calif. and a second in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Long Beach edition will be re-locating to Vancouver and Whistler starting next year, the conference's 30th anniversary.

"Having the TED organizers choose Vancouver as their new home is a big vote of confidence in the creative entrepreneurs, social innovators and community leaders who make Vancouver a leading-edge city," Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson wrote in a statement.

TED announced that the conference will be held March 17-24, 2014 at the Vancouver Convention Centre and a satellite event, TEDactive, will be held in Whistler, B.C.

"Inside this center, we’ll be building a new kind of TED theater — one designed to maximize the impact of talks while also taking advantage of the panoramic views of the North Shore Mountains. Our stage designers are dreaming up what this new space will look like as we speak," conference organizers wrote in their blog post.

The Vancouver Sun's Jeff Lee wrote that the negotiations for the event were so secret that only staffers with the Canadian Tourism Commission and Tourism Vancouver were privy to it. Vancouver's mayor did not even find out about it until last week.

The newspaper reported the conference has signed on to come to Vancouver for two years.

The conference regularly invites scientists, thinkers, business people and technologists to deliver lectures on a topic of their choice. The talks are widely syndicated as videos and podcasts.

But the chance of getting tickets will be slim to none. Tickets at $7,500 each are reserved for an "elite group of people", Amber Sessions, a spokeswoman for Tourism Vancouver, told Metro.

"The people that go to TED are like, Oprah and Bill Gates. You have to apply to go. Even just being wealthy won’t secure you a spot," she said.

The Huffington Post is an editorial partner with the TED conference, through our TED Weekend series.

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