Ted

APP OF THE WEEK: 9 cert, TED Conferences LLC, iPad (also iPhone, iPod Touch) ****

Nothing to do with the forthcoming foul-mouthed bear film, Ted is a non-profit project that gathers speakers from around the world. The general theme is innovation, which is as wide-ranging as you imagine. The app breaks the speeches down into categories, such as design, food, medicine, feminism, technology, and many more. There are also tags, listed alphabetically, from AI to youth, and speakers range from the familiar (Bill Gates, Alain de Botton, Jamie Oliver) to the relatively unknown. It’s nicely laid out – you can listen to audio only for many speeches, each video has a list of related ones, and you can also download talks and save them for offline viewing. Sometimes the flowery language betrays its self importance (“let serendipity guide you to a playlist of undiscovered talks”), but this is food for thought that doesn’t feel like eating your vegetables.