It's TED week here at the It's Alive in the Lab blog. Today's schedule includes:

As I have mentioned for four days in a row, "TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading that started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. With two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize." ^source Starting Sunday through March 2, the conference is being held in Long Beach.

On Monday I covered the Master Classes. On Tuesday I covered the Autodesk Social Space. On Wednesday I covered the Cage Matches. Today I want to talk about the TED Prize.

For the first time in its history, the TED Prize is being awarded not to an individual, but to an idea upon which the future depends - The City 2.0. The City 2.0 is the city of the future. The City 2.0 promotes innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity. It reduces the carbon footprint of its occupants, facilitates smaller families, and eases the environmental pressure on the world's rural areas such as the Rain Forest. The City 2.0 is a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, and life.

Autodesk fully supports the TED Prize City 2.0 initiatives with Autodesk tools and services. As part of our partnership with TED, Autodesk Fellow, Tom Wujec, conducted an ideation session to formulate the prize details. Autodesk management facilitated the clarification of The City 2.0 Prize. TED asked Autodesk to produce an animation to be incorporated into the TED site. Autodesk Labs hosts free tools such as Project Vasari to help further the initiatives. Cities, like anything else, need to be designed, and design doesn't just fall from the sky. Instead urban planning professionals create, evaluate, and communicate infrastructure proposals and make trade-offs for features like transportation, land use, water consumption, or energy. For this, Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler fits the bill. Autodesk is proud to be associated with The City 2.0.

Rewards are alive at TED.