Bruno Giussani

Bruno Giussani (born in Switzerland in 1964) is the European director of TED and the curator and host of TEDGlobal conference and of other TED events. He also curates and hosts the annual Swiss conference, Forum des 100. He is a member of the boards of Tinext, a Swiss software firm, and of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford University, a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. Through his firm Giussani Group LLC he advises public organisations, such as the ICRC, as well as private companies, is an author and a frequent public speaker. In 2011, 2012 and 2014 Wired UK selected him as one of the "Wired 100. In January 2016 he received the SwissAward/Person of the year 2015 in the category "Economy". He lives in Switzerland.

Giussani directs the European activities of TED, the nonprofit organization behind the TED conferences and the popular online TEDtalks, and is a member of its senior team.

Through conferences, TEDtalks available for free—and subtitled in many languages—, the TEDPrize, the TED Fellowship, TED Books, an educational initiative called TED-Ed, hundreds of local independently organized events under the label TEDx, collaborations with organisations ranging from NPR to Chinese web portals and Japanese television, and more, TED focuses on "Ideas Worth Spreading." Its flagship conferences are considered among the world's most innovative and are regularly sold out months in advance. Giussani joined TED in 2005, and produced the first TEDGlobal event in Oxford, England. TEDGlobal 2011-2013 took place in Edinburgh, Scotland, and TEDGlobal 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Prior to joining TED, Giussani was a well-known writer and commentator. For several years he edited the political section of Swiss news magazine L'Hebdo before becoming its US correspondent and, later, its technology columnist and editor of the first Swiss online news web site, Webdo, launched in 1995. His writings have been published in newspapers, magazines and websites in Europe and the United States, including The New York Times (for which he wrote the EuroBytes column from 1996 to 2000), The Wall Street Journal Europe, the European editions of Wired magazine, The Economist, Business Week, The International Herald Tribune, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), L'Hebdo (Switzerland), Libération (France), Il Sole-24Ore (Italy), The Huffington Post, and more. He was also the European editor of the now-defunct Industry Standard magazine and one of the founding editors of its European version, and the producer of the magazine's Global Internet Summit (Barcelona, 2000).

His former blog, Lunch Over IP, which he wrote from 2005 to 2008 (still available online as an archive) won him a national "Golden Mouse" award in 2006 for the best Swiss theme blog, while his articles on technology and innovation in L'Hebdo were awarded in 1995 the Swiss prize for technology journalism.

He has authored or co-authored several books, favoring a pragmatic, no-hype approach. A reviewer in The International Herald Tribune wrote that in his book Roam. Making Sense of the Wireless Internet (Random House, 2001 and 2002) he "first bursts the bubble of mobile hype and then explains why wireless communications really matters and how it works."

In 2005 he launched with L'Hebdo the annual Forum des 100 in Lausanne, which he hosts and which is today considered the foremost conference in Western Switzerland. He has also been instrumental in launching and developing the LIFT conference (Geneva, Switzerland) and the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and was an adviser to the DLD conference (Munich, Germany) among other ideas-sharing initiatives. From 1998 to 2000 he was Head of Online Strategy at the World Economic Forum (also known as the Davos Forum). He was a member of the jury of Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge 2014.

Giussani has co-founded two Internet companies: Tinet, in 1995, the first Internet service provider in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland (then sold to Swissonline/Cablecom), and Tinext, in 2000, a software firm with offices in Switzerland, Italy and Dubai, of which he is Vice-Chairman. He was the Director of Innovation of the short-lived 3GMobile, an attempt to launch a new mobile telecom player in Switzerland. From 2002 to 2008 he was a member of the board of Namics, the largest Swiss Internet consultancy.

Giussani is an alumnus of the University of Geneva, where he graduated in Social and Economic Sciences in 1989. He was a 2004 Fellow at the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University and an Affiliated Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.