TED TALKS:

Forget Davos: I'm Booked Up For TED: The Monterey thinkfest has become Silicon Valley's -- and Tinseltown's -- place to be seen (business Week)

Beginning in 1984, high-rolling techies mixed with entertainers and others to trade big ideas at the TED (technology, entertainment, and design) conference, held in recent years in Monterey. The Apple (AAPL ) Macintosh was first unveiled during TED. Wired magazine received its first seed money there. And last year Google used the occasion to appoint Larry Brilliant head of its billion-dollar charitable arm, Google.org.

But lately, feeding off the second Internet boom, TED has climbed into the celebrity-circuit stratosphere. The demand to get in rivals such gatherings as the Allen & Company Sun Valley conference, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. Nearly 1,000 TEDsters paid $4,400 to attend this year's three-and-a-half-day, invitation-only festivities, which begin on Mar. 7. And openings for next year's conference sold out in mid-February, just 10 days after registration opened, even after the price of entry was bumped to $6,000.

Author/technologist Chris Anderson, 50, who used his charitable foundation to buy the conference in 2000, is harnessing this momentum to turn TED into a global brand. TED has launched a $100,000 humanitarian prize and now runs a biannual global conference as well, which will take place in Arusha, Tanzania. This summer, Anderson started free Webcasts of past sessions, called TED Talks.