Summit Series is sort of TED for younger innovators, bringing entrepreneurs, artists, and musicians together in a often invite-only conference setting to meet top-flight speakers and global personalities such as Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, former President Bill Clinton, and Ted Turner.

Source: Summit Series

The bird’s nest

The first structure the group has built on the mountain? A bird’s nest for humans,

Summit’s mission is “to create business opportunity, address global issues, support artistic achievement, and build community in an effort to make our world a more joyful place.” I’m cynically tempted to say they probably like apple pie and motherhood, too, but the group isn’t just good intentions: Summit has raised more than $2 million for charity over the past four years.

The mountain will be home to Summit Eden, which the organization aims to develop as a residential community and an “epicenter of innovation in the heart of the Wasatch Mountains.” Its 10,000 acres include a lake, skiing slopes, and hiking and horseback riding trails.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime project,” Summit’s managing partner Greg Mauro says in a promo video. “I think with this project if we can stay true to our mission … we can create one of the most incredible places in the world.”

Summit will be building roads and homes — a small residential community — and perhaps more. ”We’d love to see incredible businesses get started here,” the company said.

According to Business Insider, the mountain cost Summit $40 million.

Developer Ubisoft Montreal is taking a cue from other works of science-fiction for its open-world stealth game Assassin’s Creed III.

Publisher Ubisoft has released a new video to promote the historically set sci-fi title, which is coming to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 30. The trailer features a disembodied male voice giving a talk about modern communication before unveiling the wonders of the Animus device and how it’ll be worked into Assassin’s Creed III’s multiplayer. The Animus is the fictional piece of hardware that allows users in the Assassin’s Creed universe to relive the memories of their ancestors.

The whole video comes off like one of those short, informative TED Talks.

The TED Conferences are a series of events that focus on spreading worthy ideas. The topics cover a variety of categories and disciplines. Famous speeches have centered on education, sex, and iPods.

The TED Talk initiative has become so influential that it’s begun seeping into popular culture. In marketing the Ridley Scott film Prometheus, the character Peter Weyland gave a fictional TED Talk at the 2023 conference that was distributed as a viral video online.

Ubisoft, while not using the TED name or format, is jumping on this latest science-fiction trope. It’s given the in-game corporation, Abstergo, a Weyland Industries-like feel and adds a textured layer to the lore.

Ubisoft will release the PC version of the game on November 20. A Wii U port is in the works but has no set release date.

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Netflix announced today that TEDTalks are being added to its library of streaming content.

TED is a conference that takes place all around the world, known for attracting speakers who give thought-provoking, big-picture speeches about a range of subjects. The motto of the conference is, “Ideas Worth Spreading” and talks run anywhere from three minutes to a half hour, hopefully packed with insight. Netflix is aggregating these talks into two and a half hour segments called TEDTalk Shows, and divvying them up into 14 different categories, such as space, beauty, and sex.

As The Next Web points out, TED is an expensive conference to go to. It can run $7,500 to see the talks in person, and unless you live in Long Beach, Calif., you’re going to pay travel expenses as well. A streaming instant-video subscription with Netflix, on the other hand, costs $7.99 a month. The TEDTalks Shows are available to Netflix customers in the U.S., UK, Canada, Latin America, and Ireland.

The announcement came soon after Amazon announced a new partnership with the Discovery Channel for its own streaming service. Amazon has quickly turned itself into a Netflix competitor, offering streaming content through Prime Instant Video. The model is slightly different from Netflix, as Amazon Prime costs $79 a year for the program which also offers perks within its broader e-commerce website (such as free 2-day shipping). But the company faces similar challenges to Netflix in creating production-studio partnerships.

The secured deal with Discovery boosted Amazon’s total video offerings count to 17,000. Netflix, which is having a harder time keeping partnerships, is still fighting at 13,855 titles, according to Instant Watcher.

Check out the video below. It isn’t actually a TED talk, but was posted on the TED website, and is an example of the awesomeness that is TED:

hat tip The Next Web; Ted image via whiteafrican/Flickr