When I came in to the office today, our project manager extraordinaire, Kristina Miller, raised an eyebrow and said, "Wow. You were really busy last night," in reference to the prolific stream of Tweets coming out of Seattle's Ignite 9.
I can't help it. How often are you in a room of so many exponentially intelligent people, dishing out ideas in five-minute blasts?
Ignite Seattle is like a mini-TED conference, with speakers given exactly five minutes and 20 slides, rotating automatically every 15 seconds. With origins in O'Reilly and Make, it's a celebration of geekitude and innovation of the cleverest kind. The events have become so popular that organizers started charging a minimal entry fee ($5) to cover costs and to keep the King Cat Theater from overflowing.
Last night's event brought speakers on topics from How to Have an Argument to Kite-Powered Wind Energy to No SQL. If you didn't like a speaker, hey, no problem--another one will be up in five minutes. If you did, speakers all provided contact information in a final slide. Or you could gather for the afterparty and pick brains while sipping a beer.
My favorite speakers of the evening were Monica Guzman and Jason Preston offering How to Have an Argument, and Becky Anderson giving Business Lessons from Star Wars:
The other benefit of attending Ignite Seattle (apart from the yummy brain juice) is that all the cool kids come out to play. Our favorite exotic-accented podcaster, Paolo Tosolini, was conducting interviews for the Live Stream, and the cream of the social media crop came out to play:
Colleen Carrington and Cheryl Nichols
The live stream--Paolo is the blur!
Icebreaker activity pre-Ignite