A while ago, me and my team organized a very large TEDxUHasselt conference with 500 attendees and speakers from all over the world. It was awesome. But what if we could do a conference with exclusively young people: both on stage and in the audience? With that idea in mind, we organized TEDxUHasseltSalon: Meeting of Young Talent.

A total of 9 speakers shared ideas on a broad range of topics: from a tech start-up and a hackerspace to saving African wildlife and plants and bacteria working together for a healthy soil. To find these speakers, we not only used our own network and research, we also invited anyone who wanted to apply to speak. Seven people did and three of them actually ended up on stage.

At the end of the event, I had the honor to announce that Wouter Vanoppré will become the new TEDxUHasselt president, because I will graduate in a few months and TEDxUHasselt is supposed to be a student-organized event. We celebrated the announcement by sharing an ad fundum of Jenever on stage. I will, however, stay strongly involved in TEDxUHasselt, focussing on strategy and speakers.

More pictures of the event can be found on the TEDxUHasselt Facebook page.

On November 10 of 2012, the TEDxUHasselt conference took place. Me and my team worked for seven months on this conference, but the results were there: it was a truly awesome day. You can confirm this yourself by watching the videos or by checking out some pictures.

Right after TEDxUHasselt 2012, we’ve sent an anonymous survey to the attendees. We were very happy to read all the enthusiastic feedback. One of the attendees puts it as follows:

It was truly one of the most perfectly organised events I ever went to. Everything was great. The talks, the food, the venue, the drinks, the people, all of it. Even the smallest details were done perfectly.

Our speakers liked the event as well:

Speaking at TEDxUHasselt was for me a great experience. Although the team keeps telling this event is all about the speakers, they actually did all the work. It was the smoothest, most well organized event I have ever been to.

97% of the attendees plans on coming back next year and over 70% feels TEDxUHasselt made an impact on their life. Mission accomplished.

After a small but very successful edition in 2011, TEDxUHasselt returns in 2012. The theme and date of this year’s edition have recently been announced:

Me and my team are hard at working making it the best event we can. But one thing is already for sure: TEDxUHasselt 2012 will exceed all your expectations.

Check out the teaser at www.tedxuhasselt.be.

When me and my team organized the first edition of TEDxUHasselt back in November 2011, we were limited to 100 attendees because of our license with TED. Since much more people applied for a ticket and many of them had to be disappointed, we decided to set up a livestream.

However, livestreams traditionally are very static experiences; they don’t quite give you that feeling of actually being at the conference. In cooperation with the Hasselt University EDM research centre, TEDxUHasselt developed an interactive 360 degrees livestream – as the first TEDx in the world – which provides an experience that goes way beyond the traditional livestream.

I had the honor to give a talk about our unique livestream at TEDxSummit, the TED-organized conference for TEDx organizers. Check it out:

How can I get this livestream at my event?

A lot of people asked us this question! Since it’s a Hasselt University research project, you can’t just rent one somewhere at this moment. However, feel free to share your contact information and we’ll keep you up-to-date:

TED Active is now over halfway so I thought I’ll share some things I’ve learned:

TED Active is a good place to meet interesting people. I’ve met a ton of entrepreneurs, TEDx organizers or just random people you bump into. I’ve just had lunch with a Sillicon Valley startup founder, yesterday I was partying with a Dutch professor and a Belgian serial entrepreneur. Pretty cool.

The TED experience is a lot more than listening to talks. On Monday I visited Long Beach, where the main TED conference takes place. There are a lot of interactive stands to visit during the breaks, the attendees are divided into groups (e.g. The techies) to bring them together and stimulate conversation.
Besides doing a tour there also where a few people of TED sharing tips for TEDx organizers and we attended a few speaker rehearsals.

Indian beer is not good (at least the one I tried).

The Rivierra resort where the conference takes place is an amazingly beautiful resort, the cheap hotel I sleep is not.

Some talks were extremely impressive, such as Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation and Jennifer Pahlea of Code for America.

New year’s eve is an original theme for a party on February 29th. But celebrating “new year” at 22h30 is pretty lame.

And finally: Americans think EVERYTHING is amazing and awesome. Even queuing in line is totally awesome.

The TEDxUHasselt conference on November 7th 2011 was a success: over 200 people applied for a ticket. However, due to our license by TED we could allow just 100 and we had to disappoint a lot of people.

When making plans for 2012 it was clear that we had to something about this. In fact, you can get a license for more than 100 attendees – but only if you attend an official TED conference. This can be TED (the original conference), TED Active (a simulcast conference of TED) or TED Global (conference in Scotland). It’s my pleasure to announce that I will be attending TED Active 2012!

Now, what’s TED Active? As I already explained it’s a simulcast conference of TED. That means it’s a conference where people watch TED live as it happens on the big screen. But there’s more: there are also live speakers, attendees in fact, who give so-called TEDYou talks, there are workshops and there are many dinners and parties to get to know the other attendees.

TED Active takes place in Palm Springs, California, from Monday February 27th until Friday March 2nd. TEDx events of one day are often called “the ultimate brain spa”. I can only imagine how awesome TED Active will be. My colleague Christophe Cop from TEDxFlanders calls it the closest thing to heaven he knows – sounds good!

One workshop I am especially looking forward to is the “Idea Hack Kickoff Party”. TED explains it as follows:

Idea Hack takes the wills and skills of the TEDActive community to hack together a service that addresses a real-world problem in 4 days. Working out of a dedicated hack space at the Riviera, two teams of 4-5 people comprised of a Project Manager, Developer/Tester, and Designer will be paired with mentors inside and outside of the TED community. Prototypes will be presented to a panel of experts from the tech and VC community. Please sign up here to join us Tuesday evening for beer and pizza in the Hack Lab as we kick off the hackathon.

My goal on a professional level is to do exactly this: designing solutions for real-world problems. Okay, a problem can be very broad: an application to make it easier to find restaurants is not really solving a big world problem, but it’s also pretty cool.

There are many more things I could write about (like the sunny weather over there), but the most important is that my visit to TED Active will allow TEDxUHasselt to become better and bigger next year. I am extremely excited about that!

Finally, I would like to thank Bob van der Vleuten and Niels Peetermans for co-founding TEDxUHasselt: obviously, without you guys this was not possible. And I want to thank Hasselt University for being an awesome university that supports enterprising students.

Oh, and one more thing: TEDxUHasselt will organize a simulcast event on the evening of Wednesday February 29th. All information about this event can be found on tedxuhasselt.be.