Ady Fong

I was born in the bucolic town of Jerteh in Eastern Malaysia. I took some time to travel to places like the Arctic and the Galapagos, eventually landing in South America, where I spent time rebuilding schools in El Salvador. Along the way, I continued to learn languages, adding Spanish and Italian to her polyglot abilities. Now my new goal, sign language. Perhaps even more adventurous than my move from Tropical Malaysia to Kansas, we then moved from Sunny Laguna Beach to New York, where I’m fusing my technical and design backgrounds into the field of User Experience Design. Using my technical background, I’m able to bring a unique perspective to what has traditionally been a design-oriented field. I co-founded FyndIt, a collaborative search product which helps people find stuff. Basically, if you’re looking for something you just can’t find, you enter it into the system as a “Want”, along with a small “tip” for whoever find it. Other members find it for you, either serendipitously or by deliberately searching for it. Fyndit is unique in that it addresses a real need – sometimes people just can’t find stuff – along with other motivations like earning money, and just plain helping each other out. I find TED exciting because it brings together many fields together, including two near and dear to me: Technology and Design. Combined with my philanthropic work in South America, and other countries, I can’t wait to see how I can participate to the TED Community.

Life.

Live bravely, go to the person within yourself, you want to be. Tippingly unsatisfied, unapologetically enough, and in-perfectly perfect.