Instead of lovely Los Angeles skies, we will be saying hello to a beautiful San Diego skyline tomorrow. If you’re in the neighborhood, we’d love for you to come by and check out our talk at UC San Diego, Angie’s alma mater.

The unforgettable UCSD library. Photo by SD Dirk.

We’re giving talk to about 300 students enrolled in the Introduction to Communication and Culture class. We’ll be sharing our journey from being an upstart start-up (pun intended) to the indie brand people know and hopefully love, with more than a few anecdotes thrown in.

While preparing for a talk, we came upon this pictures from our very first art show. Can you see the love?

You can see more shots from that epic night here.

We’re super excited to be there tomorrow and Angie hasn’t even seen her campus since she graduated. We’ll be giving the talk to a class of Communications majors, the same program Angie finished.

Our talk is tomorrow (May 26) at 12:30 pm at Room 108, Peterson Hall, Thurgood Marshall College. Here’s a map

If you do decide to stop by (yay!), get a parking ticket at the machine in the Extension lot (first lot on Muir College Drive (near the Torrey Pines North turn-in).

We are currently heading into day 3 of TED 2011 and TEDActive. Follow along with us on Twitter, we are updating frequently there and you can keep up with the conference with us. Yesterday was huge. Everyone from Bill Gates to TED 2011 prize winner and artist, JR took the stage… and a special appearance and updated talk from 2010 prize winner, activist, and chef, Jamie Oliver.

Jamie gave a passionate talk about The Food Revolution, the triumphs in the past year including community kitchens, the Emmy winning television show, and healthy Food Revolution food trucks across the country. But, challenges still exist which is why he took the stage and urged the TED community to act. One shocking thing to learn is that he and his ideas to change the food served in schools has been banned in hundreds of schools in Los Angeles school districts. Yes, banned. Learn more about what Jamie is doing here he has updated the site with a petition you can be involved in.

All of the talks at TED are broken into themes. Under “Worlds Imagined”, documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock talked about his next film, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. From what I gather, it’s a documentary about selling his film to corporations and in turn product placing those corporate products in his film. Morgan puts a magnifying glass to branding, advertising, marketing and the effects they have in our society, but, more importantly, looking inward, learning about himself…. or ourselves. In a segment of the talk, he applies corporate branding strategies to “Morgan Spurlock” and reveals his own brand… the talk was amazing, really funny, and strangely uplifting…. More on The Greatest Movie Ever Sold which premiered at Sundance this year.

In “Knowledge Revolution”, Bill Gates introduced us to Salman Khan. He started the Khan Academy, a not for profit online educational site for students, teachers, home-schoolers, principals, and adults returning to the classroom. The website has video tutorials for K-12 math, science, and topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics. Not only for learning, the site contains analytical tools to track progress for teachers. He has rolled the program out to Los Altos High School and with over a million users, it is a serious tool ready to be implemented in classrooms around the country.

In the theme “Radical Collaboration”, TED 2011 Prize winner, JR took the stage for the most amazing talk yet…. more on that a little later, I have to catch the talks now, it just getting underway, the theme is “Invention and Consequence”.

You may have noticed all of the TED talks I posted last week. We were getting inspired and preparing for TED2011 and the talks that start today! We are honored to have been invited to set up a Poketo shop for all of the TEDsters in Palm Springs for TEDActive.

TEDActive happens simultaneously with the talks that happen at TED in Long Beach. TEDActive is a more “active” TED filled with interactive art installations, workshops, parties, the sun, pool, and for the first time, a Poketo shop! This year theme, The Rediscovery of Wonder, brings together global innovators – the doers of the world making a difference in their communities and their professions – to interact and learn from one another in an amazing Palm Springs environment while absorbing TED2011.

The proceeds from the Poketo shop at TEDActive go directly to the TED Fellows program which supports world-changing innovators making an impact around the globe. TED 2011 Fellows include, Sey Min, an interactive designer that is reimagining how humans relate to technologies, to societies and cities, and to environments. She founded Randomwalks.org, a media art studio that takes real visitor feedback on cities and redefines cities in real time. Another is Suzanne Lee, a British artist and fashion designer who is making fabric and clothes out of bacteria she cultivates. She is literally growing her own clothes! Surely unconventional, but, this is what makes TED Fellows unique.

What everyone is excited about is the annual TED Prize winner. The TED Prize is $100,000 awarded to an exceptional individual, but, more importantly, the winner poses one wish for all of us to act on, a wish to change the world. TED Prize recipients in the past have included Bill Clinton, Dave Eggers, Jamie Oliver, Jehane Noujaim, Karen Armstrong, Bono, and more.

The 2011 prize winner is “street” artist, JR. JR employs large scale photography and street art methods of wheat pasting to tell stories and change landscapes around the world. JR has has traveled and put up his huge installations in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya, Cambodia, China, Israel/Palestine, Brazil, the US and more. When you see the images, they are arresting, it’s like looking into yourself.

The TED talks are all this week, we are excited to be part of this intimate experience at TEDActive. There is still an opportunity to get a group together and watch the talks live via the internet. Below are some of our top picks, ones we can’t wait to watch. The drawings below comes straight from the TED conference book!

Artist: JR… Kenya, Liberia, Brazil, India, and Cambodia are 5 countries that JR visited for Women Are Heroes.

Philanthropist: Bill Gates… no introductions needed.

Explorer: Sarah Marquis…. she has wandered 510 days through Australia alone.

Artist, curator, architectural designer, and activist: Ai Weiwei… 100,000,000 is the number of hand-painted porcelain “sunflower seeds” in one of his sculptures exhibited at Tate Modern.

Data Artist: Aaron Koblin … was part of Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown.

Benjamin Zander is world renown for being a music conductor and a speaker on leadership. He uses music and his wonderful charisma to open peoples minds. This is one of the most inspirational talks I’ve come across on TED. What Benjamin Zander asks of us is to step into life like it’s music… he says “this is about vision, about the long line. Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn’t care about the fences underneath”. Of course, there is the journey, there are the obstacles, the progress, the achievements in between… but Zander asks us to look to the horizon…. the vision.