Ignite Seattle #9 is this Thursday! It’s going to be at the King Cat Theatre. Doors open at 7:00PM. To cover rising costs the door price will be $5.

It’s one of 65+ Ignite events happening around the world right now. You can follow the action at http://igniteshow.com and on Twitter with the #giw tag.

Ignite Seattle Details
Ignite Seattle will feature ~15 speakers. Doors will open at 7:00PM. The gumdrop building contest starts at 7:30PM and the talks will start at 8:30PM. We have had our venue costs go up significantly and we will be charging $5 at the door.

Synapse!
We’d like to welcome Ignite Seattle’s first sponsor! Synapse designs nifty products.

Sponsor Ignite Seattle
We are looking for more sponsors. You’ll be put on the website, tweeted about, thanked profusely at the event and have the heart-warming knowledge that you helped make Ignite possible.

21+ Only
Unfortunately, due to pressure from the State Liquor Board the King Cat is no longer able to support a mixed age crowd. This sucks. We know it sucks, however we can’t expect the venue to risk losing its license. Right now the King Cat is the only venue in town that is feasible. If you know of another let us know.

Global Ignite Week
What started in Seattle has spread around the world. During the first ever Global Ignite Week there are ~65 events happening on 6 continents. On Thursday there will be over 30 events.

http://IgniteShow.com/Seattle
Ignite has launched a video portal. There are almost 40 cities represented with several hundred videos aggregated together. Start with Seattle, but definitely check out other cities’ talks.

Top 10 Reasons You Should Go To Ignite
Mashable wrote up a very insightful list of reasons to come to Ignite. If you need help getting your housemate to join you for the evening, send it to them.

Speaker Line-up
Randy has posted them.

Ignite Seattle 8 is tonight! As always we have a cornucopia of speakers talking about a variety of geek topics. The doors to the King Cat Theatre open at 7:00. The talks start at 8:30 PM. It makes “cents” to bring your art hat for tonight’s warm-up that starts at 7:30pm.

Here’s the line up (in order of appearance):

Eugene Lin – iPhoning my way to retirement, $.70 at a time
I want to be rich. Steve Jobs promised it. App after app, the Apple gods got angry with me. Until finally, with nothing but an accelerometer, two dozen naked women, and the nation of Japan, I had a story to tell.

Arianna O’Dell (arianna) How to Sneak into Bars
I am a 19 year old student at the University of Washington. Most people don’t know this because they never ask. I’ve been attending networking events all summer and most people think I’m out of school and already graduated.

Benjamin Franklin – Intellect: without an outlet in the world
Do we remain in awe of Ben Franklin’s capacity and accomplishments or do we take on his mantle of “Doing the best with what we have” and look at our issues and do something about them? Better yet, WWBFD? [Brady's note: This is going to be a presentation by someone done as Benjamin Franklin. You can learn more on his site.

Wendy Chisholm (wendyabc) Challenge your assumptions. Innovate. Change the world.
Most designers are taught to design for the average user and as a society we hold many assumptions about the characteristics of those users. However, products are used in unexpected ways and by unexpected audiences.

Jeremy Bingham (captain_tenille) An Astronomical Viewing Shelter on the Cheap
Using your telescope in the city can be frustrating with all the stray light all over the place. You can’t do much about the skyglow, but you can shield yourself from stray light sources nearby.

Jon Bell (jonbell) Usability Beyond the Classroom
It wasn’t until I spent a year at frog design as a developer that I realized everything I learned in art school was either wrong, outdated, or only told half the story.

Peter Wilson (peterwil) Google vs. Microsoft: An Insiders Guide
Google vs. Microsoft: where will the battles be fought, how will each companies strategies and blind-spots impact the outcomes, and who will win? The speaker spent 9 years at Microsoft and 4 at Google, and so thinks he knows something about this…

Scott Berkun (berkun) Everything you need to know about philosophy in 5 minutes
I’m the sad owner of a philosophy degree. I’m convinced i can give people a better education in philosophy (and make them realize how much they already know and love philosophy) in 5 minutes than I got in 4 years.

Part 2

Mike Tyka – Cubes in the Sky
We went through about 10 designs each trying to achieve the same goal of somehow raising the 15×15x15ft Groovik’s Cube, weighing near 4000 lbs 10 feet in the air within a fairly tight budget.

Richard Bailey – More blink in less time? Manufacturing electronics for art projects.
The Groovik Cube required a custom surface mount circuit board for each of the 56 facets. Early estimates showed that this would require well over 150 hours of time to accomplish. The Groovik electronics team created an assembly line and produced 90 boards in one day.

Sarah Schacht (sarahschacht) Overcoming Cacophony: Making Gov 2.0 Work for You
What can you do, as an individual to make your voice heard in the lawmaking process and what tools do you use? Learn how to make your email float to the top of a pile of thousands, how to stand out from the crowd, and how to do so without losing your sanity.

Veronica Sopher (Shih_Wei) Jewelry: It’s What Geeks Know!
Elizabeth Taylor and Ivanka Trump may have their own jewelry lines, but it’s geeks like you/us who are the experts in jewelry. Yes, it takes a real geek to know jewelry, cut through the salesperson’s bs, and shop like a pro. Let me show you why.

Norman Guadagno (thinktone) Amazon Archaeology OR Swimming In Our Own Clickstream
Every time we buy from Amazon, we give their algorithms a little more information about ourselves (or at least the things we buy). But, do we have our own algorithms to help us make sense of purchase after purchase across time? What can we learn about ourselves through the things we buy?

Dylan Wilbanks (dylanw) Everyone Core Dumps: Death and Loss For The Geek
We are all going to die. But handling loss is something geeks struggle with. Learn three things you should do when a friend dies, three things you shouldn’t do, and ways you can preserve your existence online.

Greg Dunlap (heyrocker) How to not suck at pinball
Pinball is hard. Luckily, getting better at pinball, not great but respectable, is actually pretty easy.

Jason Carmel (defenestrate99) Defamation and Twitter – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
I will provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the asshats of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.

Ron Burk (ronburk) Three Strange Definitions of Computer Programming Legendary computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said: “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” But if programming is not about the computers, what IS it about?

See you there

We’re excited about Ignite Seattle and we hope to see there. If you are tweeting about the event, use #is8 and if you are taking photos, please add them to our Flickr group and/or Facebook page.

Ignite Seattle 7 is happening on August 3rd and talk submissions are open. If you have a 5 minute talk that will inspire, teach or just make people think then throw your hat in the ring. We’ll take ~16 speakers (and no repeats from last time). Get your talk in by July 1st.

Submit your talk here.

We’ve already got two great speakers lined up. First, I’m happy to welcome back Rob “How To Buy A Car” Gruhl with a talk on How To Take Photographs (check out his photos on Flickr ).  Second, we’ve lined up Matthew Amster-Burton, local food writer and author of Hungry Monkey (AKA How to raise a foodie).

We had over 500 people in attendance at the last Ignite event in April, with great talks by:

• Jen Zug (Sanity Hacks of a Stay-at-Home Mom),
• Hillel Cooperman (The Secret Underground World of Lego)
• Ron Burk’s viral hit (The Psychology of Incompetence)

If you need inspiration about “How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk,” Scott Berkun can help you out.

Ignite will be held once again at the King Cat Theater (map). We look forward to seeing you there!

There are many ways to stay up-to-date on the newly revived Ignite Seattle.

Ignite Mailing List – We have an announcement list for keeping you uptodate. We only send out 1-2 mails per month. The content is limited to Ignite news and other similar events from the Ignite community. You can sign up here. Only Ignite organizers can send mail to this list.
IgniteSea on Twitter – If 140 character sound bites are more your speed, follow us @ignitesea.
Ignite Seattle Blog – You’re reading this post on the blog. You can also subscribe via RSS.
Local Seattle Blogs – Seattlest, Seattle 2.0, The Big Blog and Techflash all let their readers know that Ignite was happening.
Ignite Site – Ignites are happening around the world every week. You can keep track of all of them (including Seattle) on the central Ignite site.

See you soon!

We’ve got a bunch of great speakers this time! Check ‘em out below. Ignite Seattle 6 will take place on 4/29 at the King Cat Theatre. Doors will open at 7PM and talk will start at 8:30PM. We are very grateful to be getting sponsorship from Google, Biznik, and Phinney Bischoff Design House.

Roy Leban (@royleban) – Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer’s
When the time came to move my father-in-law into an Alzheimer’s facility, I approached the problem as I approach any technical problem — I needed to meet the needs of the user, even if he didn’t know them and couldn’t express them. I crafted an experience (a UX) for him in his new home which meets those needs and I worked to make sure that the actual move itself did the same.

Ron Burk – The Psychology of Incompetence
Why does software suck so bad? Is it possible that a lot of us really smart computer programmers are, in fact… incompetent?

Dominic Muren (@dmuren) – Humblefacturing a Sustainable Electronic Future
We geeks love our personal tech. iPhones, Kindles, and Netbooks — these are the things we are quick to buy, and quick to trade up to stay on the bleeding edge. But in our wake we leave mountains of discarded, useless, and toxic ex-electronics. But must this necessarily be the case?

Jason Preston (@Jasonp107) – Goobye Tolstoy: How to say anything in 140 characters or less
Twitter’s greatest contr. to society is: any idea can be shared in 140 chars or less-beyond that, it’s just drivel. See how & why in 5 mins.

Jamie Gower – How to Set Up a Machinima Studio for $20 (or Hamlet: Armed and Dangerous)
The startling true story of the production of the climax from Hamlet that defied sanity—staged entirely in Starcraft: Brood War, a deeply-discounted, 11-year old computer game!

Chris DiBona (@cdibona) – The Coolness of Telemedicine
Remote medicine is coming a long way. Chris will run us through the latest.

Ken Beegle (@kbeegle) – Decoding Sticks and Waves
Yesterday’s breakthrough solutions are today’s historical curiosities. Such is the case of stick charts, which were once used to navigate the Marshall Islands. By observing the waves, wind and stars, select Marshall Islanders were able to find their way across the water. In 1898, Captain Winkler of the German Navy began decoding the stick charts, allowing us to understand how and why the charts worked. Using his experiences as a lens, we can look at the maps we’re building today and ask what type of historical curiosities will they become.

Maya Bisineer (@thinkmaya) – Geek Girl – A life Story
From being a tomboy, secretly hiding away my cousin’s hot-wheels cars at 5 yrs of age all the way to imposing geekiness on my own 2 year old by refusing her pink dresses . I WILL make a claim that we are a special breed of people that need special privileges in order to save our creed.

Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) – Public Library Hacking
Money tight? Want to save more for a rainy day? If you aren’t fully utilizing your public library, you might be wasting thousands of dollars a year!Librarian Dawn Rutherford will give you a quick trip through all your public libraries have to offer, and how to make the most of it, using tricks and tips gleaned from someone who has spent over half her life working or volunteering in them.

Mike Tykka – The Invention of the Wheel
It seems Nature has beaten man to almost every “invention” of his: Helicopters, Submarines, Electricity, Video Cameras, Supercomputers, etc. For the longest time i thought one notable exception was the wheel – seems hard to do out of flesh: think blood vessels; How do they attach? Then i started studying biochemistry and learned about proteins. Turns out nature has invented a full blown, reversible, proton driven turbine engine, many tens of thousands of which churn away in every one of the billions of cells in a human body.

Beth Goza (@bethgo) – Knitting in Code
Remember the joy of writing your first Hello World application? Do you still have a copy somewhere so you can gaze upon your coded baby steps into the world of binary goodness? In knitting, creating something beautiful is just like binary, with a series of knits and pearls you can dream up the most sophisticated of patterns. In the spirit of hi-tech meets hand-tech, I will show you how to convert your binary Hello World app into a pattern of stitches (think kint =1 pearl = 0), so that you can create, mount, frame and hang your Hello World genius for all to see.

Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) – The Secret Underground World of Lego
Get a glimpse of a thriving user generated content ecosystem that’s been around since long before the web. See an incredible example of a community, and how a large corporation has completely let go of control only to find incredible success despite and maybe because of the economic downturn.

Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
We’ve all heard that it’s a myth that creativity occurs in isolation. We’ve even heard about *group genius*, the ability for group with “flow” to create ground-breaking works of art or technology. Well, in this brief talk Shelly Farnham, social scientist and leading expert in community technologies, will take it to the next level and provide tips for how to leverage *community genius* to improve your creative powers.

Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) – The Mac Spy
I made a last minute decision to attend a meeting I somehow caught wind of. Assured of its importance, I flew down yet again, not even a month after MacWorld, to see what would happen at this 25 year reunion of the Berkeley Mac User Group.

Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk
To give a good talk you want to have a story. You have to be able to frame it. If you’re going to give an Ignite talk you have to do this really, really quickly.

Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
A digital fairy tale about a young woman who realizes that first person video footage from her own life is being posted to YouTube – before the events actually occur in real life.

Jen Zug (@jenzug) – The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
Drawing from her real life as a stay at home mom (as opposed to her imaginary life as a bar tender on Cape Cod), Jen Zug shares her parenting hacks to staying sane when the majority of her day is spent discussing the merits of Optimus Prime over Buzz Light Year.

After over a year on hiatus, Ignite Seattle is back, at a new venue (thanks to the King Cat Theater) on April 29th. Same as before, we’ll have 16 speakers – talks will be limited to 5 minutes a piece each 20 slides, so that’s 15 seconds a slide. It always goes faster than you think.

Right now, we’re looking for speakers – we have a form setup for you to apply in this post below.

We’re taking talk submissions from everyone — whether this is your first time or whether you’ve done an Ignite talk before.

Topics usually tend towards web 2.0, startups, life hacks, etc., but it can really be about anything that would appeal to a roomful of tech geeks and Internet junkies. Some of the favorite talks from last year included Hacking the Technical Interview and A Pseudoscience Guide to Geek Dating. You can view all of the recent talks on the Ignite Seattle YouTube channel.

We’re taking submissions until April 16th, and they’re accepted on a rolling basis, so submit early. We look forward to seeing you on the 29th!

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We have two ignites coming up in Seattle. The first one will be Ignite at Seattle BizJam on 6/9. It’s going to be the opening event for the awesome conference aimed at local, independent business owners.

Then on 8/9 we will have our next Ignite Seattle. Save the date!

It will be held at the CHAC. It will open with an Ignite activity run by Bre Pettis starting at 6:30. The activity? A scavenger hunt… of sorts. It will be followed by some Ignite talks. A call for talks will be issued shortly.

Bre and I would like to thank the following people for their help before, during and after Ignite 3.

Thanks to:

Matt May – He left the event to get us a projector; we would have been screwed without him.
Allegra Searle-LeBel – She ran a camera helped with video setup
Ryan Stewart – He was the live twitterer.
Paolo Tosolini – He ran a third video camera and edited the awesome behind the scenes video. Connie Savoie – She braved the onslaught of paper airplanes to hold up the hula-hoop.

Special thanks to:
Bryan Zug – He is the lead cameraman, a/v guy, and editor of the ignite videos.
Jesse Robbins – He is the speaker and presentation wrangler
Gabriel Williams – He made an admin form that none of you saw, but saved me a ton of time.

And thanks to everyone who came and has been supporting us.

We have a logo! We’ve been working on it for a while and we’re pretty happy with the results.

Brian McConnell, one of our Ignite 3 speakers, wrote in to tell us that the subject of his talk is ready to be used! From Brian:

The Worldwide Lexicon, an open source translation project, made its first appearance at Ignite. WWL enables websites to translate their content to any language, by recruiting bilingual users from their audience to contribute translations via a wiki. WWL is inviting more websites to join its test. Visit www.worldwidelexicon.org for more information.

Joining the network is as simple as posting your site’s full text RSS feed address. WWL polls your RSS feed for new texts, and then creates wiki pages for translations to any number of languages. You can either let WWL host the translations, or if you want to be fancy about it, loop RSS back from the WWL system to your site.

Ignite 3 happens tonight. Here are the details:

Where: CHAC Upstairs – 1621 12th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122 (don’t worry we’ll have more space this time)
When:

• 6:00 – Doors Open
• 6:30 – Paper Airplane Challenge Begins
• 8:00 – Break
• 8:30 – Ask Later Talks: Round 1 begins (full schedule)
• 9:15 – Break
• 9:45 – Ask Later Talks: Round 2 begins
• 10:30 – End of Ignite

Why: Because it’s fun!

Here’s another batch of talks:

1. Thomas Schmitz (SEOcritique.com, ) – Become a Marketing Piranha

Think about the piranha. You know, that monstrous tiny little fish. By itself its just small and ugly. It might nip at you, but you can easily get away. As a school, piranhas are fierce and can take down large prey. You wouldn’t want to be a caribou in a pack of hungry piranhas. If you set aside the horror movie connotation there is a lesson here. By working together the piranhas get the caribou and there is enough food for each fish. The piranhas are the sellers in your market or the members of your network. The caribou is the market, the buyers and the prospects. It’s a big Amazon river out there, but by working together it’s your school of fish that is enjoying the meal. I especially like this analogy because when you look at a school of feeding piranhas you will see that there is also competition within the pack. It’s not uncommon for individual fish to get pecked and cut-up a little. Still, there is enough caribou or market share for every fish to get a meal. Also related with concepts to be included, What Dr. Doolittle Can Teach About Marketing and Networking.


2. Brian McConnell (Worldwide Lexicon, Radio Handi) – Worldwide Lexicon – Participatory Translation For The Web

The Worldwide Lexicon enables website and blog authors to translate their sites through a combination of automated and human translation. The service, which is in internal testing, and will go to public beta shortly, works as follows: It monitors a site’s RSS feed for new works If possible, it obtains a rough machine translation to several target languages It creates a wiki page for each translation in progress The publisher directs readers to the wikis to participate in refining translations or starting translations to additional languages. We may be ready to demo on the 28th (not sure, but would like to present at Ignite this time or next). I can be reached at brian@mcconnell.net or 4154250833.

3. Karen Anderson (Writer Way, Biznik) – Workplace Survival Tips

I’m a graying geek with many years of tech workplace experience, most recently six years at Apple’s .Mac Internet Services and the iTunes Music Store. Workplace Survival Tips is quirky look at what’s over-rated, what’s under-rated and what’s absolutely essential in the workplace environment. Slides will cover the topics listed below. My presentation experience includes commentary for KUOW-FM. For a sense of my communication style, take a look at my blog, Writer Way. Teamwork Money Apologies Office Friendships Office Romances The “In” Crowd Indignation Martinis, Mojitos and Single Malts Making the Rounds Training Evil People Phone, SMS and Email Skills Humor Sweat Management Books The Impact of Visuals “Being Yourself”

4. Shelly Farnham (Waggle Labs, ) - Why Social Tagging Really Matters (to me): Semantic Overlays on Social Networks

Social tagging has revolutioned how we organize and retrieve online resources in systems such as Delicio.us, Flickr, and BlueDot. Yet, they have been incorporated into social networking systems in only rudimentary forms. I will talk about the potential for social tags to provide a semantic overlay to social networks, and illustrate how we used them to develop a social map of Seattle Mind Camp, and are incorporating them into our Pathable project.

5. Coe Roberts (Real Networks, ) – No-Frills Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done is a powerful system that you can use to run your whole life. But what if you don’t want to run your whole life? What if you just want to make sure some things don’t fall through the cracks? Here’s an easy-to-implement, low-overhead suggestion.

6. Eric Nevala (, ) – IT at Marine Headquarters, Al Anbar Province, Iraq

* As a local US Marine Reservist who recently completed a second tour of duty in Iraq, I maintained servers, software systems, databases, built web applications, and tested cutting edge technology in an unstable environment. * In my presentation are a series of photographs and antecdotes about some of the cool stuff that I worked on * The future of IT in the Marine Corps and the practical concept of mobile, virtualized server rooms with no downtime (And if I have time, some info about the centralized reconstruction management website application I developed for western Iraq) -Eric

7. Carl Coryell-Martin (Cassettes2Cds, ) – Tamasheq Technology: Living La Vie Nomad

What kinds of technology do you find 4 days of driving from the nearest paved road? In the winter of 2005, I spent a month living and traveling with members of an extended Tamasheq family in the deserts of central Mali, West Africa. This will be a quick tour of the tools and systems from sat phones to forges to food preservation practiced by one tribe of modern African nomads. (I’m sorry I missed the submission deadline, for some reason I didn’t see the email announcement that you were open to proposals. This is one of two talks I’m interested in giving. The linked photo gallery is on my sister’s website but is almost exclusively my work.)

8. Scott Berkun (, ) – Attention and Sex

What things in your life demand undivided attention? Whatever they are, I claim they define your life more than anything else you do. Your obituary will not list the hours you fought off boring meetings or ignored your friends by reading forgettable blurbs about forgettable things on your cell phone. This talk explores how the wise and happy throughout history have avoided situations that divided their attention.

As you can see we’ve got a bunch of great talks lined up for you. The final schedule will be up tomorrow. Note that the Marketing talk on gender and the talk on Epidemiology have both been canceled; we hope the speakers will be able to speak at the next Ignite.

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The THIRD one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Thursday, April 5th. The Make Contest will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Videos and photos from the previous Ignite are available. Admission is free.

More talk, more talks, more talks!

1. Mark Novak (Microsoft University of Washington) – Security Guarantees

The topic is “security guarantees” – a way for the uninitiated to dissect security of systems (including software systems) and demand more secure solutions. I will use my 5 minutes to illustrate the concept by breaking security of OpenID – twice! – using nothing but common sense and a little bit of common knowledge.

2. Maegan Ashworth (University of Washington Dept of Epidemiology Seattle Biomedical Research Institute) – No, Not Skin: An Introduction to Epidemiology

An introduction to the basic study designs, modeling approaches and technologies used in epidemiology, illustrated with infectious and noninfectious diseases of interest.

3. Keith Schorsch (PeerWisdom ex-Amazon) – Making Sweet Lemonade

How do find the idea that you are passionate about? How do you integrate your life and work experiences, both good and bad? I’ll share how my experiences at Amazon, McCaw, and with some personal health issues inspired the idea for our new venture, PeerWisdom, a social network for health.

Health was a big theme this time. It’s something I am researching for O’Reilly and then I received three health submissions. Good stuff.

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The THIRD one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Thursday, April 5th. The Make Contest will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Videos and photos from the previous Ignite are available. Admission is free.

You’ve created your new killer app or your new business. How are you going to connect to your audience? The following talks may be a bit of a help.

1. Heather Flanagan (PeopleGeekTV GearLive.com) – How Video Blogging Creates Cultural Innovation

This should be a highly entertaining presentation about the potential of vlogging to create greater collective compassion and empathy as well as providing a laboratory for cultural innovations and experimentation. With a blog or vlog one has the ability to create and collaborate on a micro-culture with new paradigms and agreements. This can pave the way for positive changes in the macro-culture. This presentation should open bloggers and vloggers eyes about the power they have to innovate socially and be a little less Jerry Springery in their blogs. Even the mighty Robert Scoble can benefit from this discusion.

2. Christopher Johnson (Phrasetrain The Name Inspector) – The Science (and Art) of Naming

Many of you have faced, or will face, the challenge of naming a company, a blog, a product, or a service. In this talk The Name Inspector will give uncensored voice to his inner geek and present a lightning intro to the science (and art) of names, drawing heavily on linguistics, cognitive science, and his own experience as a namer and name analyst. He’ll talk about the mechanics of speech sound production, the symbolic properties of sounds, the structure of syllables, the poetics of names, the morphological types of names, the way words and their meanings are stored and accessed in memory, the conceptual principles of metaphor and metonymy at the root of word associations, and–using some prominent examples–not only what but HOW names mean.

3. Chuck Pettis (BrandSolutions, Inc. Earth Sanctuary) – Differences Between Men & Women in Personal Life & Advertising

Men and women aren’t just from Mars and Venus. We are from different galaxies! Learn about some of the key male-female differences based on recent brain research that can help you improve your personal relationships with the opposite sex and improve the effecitivness of your marketing and advertising.

The impact of video on the culture you live and work in, the sway of names, and power of gender – they all have my interest piqued.

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The THIRD one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Thursday, April 5th. The Make Contest will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Videos and photos from the previous Ignite are available. Admission is free.

Ignite is next week! There’s going to be a great line-up this time. I am going to start revealing the speakers over the next couple of days. Here is the first batch.

1. Alex Hopmann (Launch21 LLC FastCarrot LLC) – Maximizing performance in aircraft engines

Aircraft engines are basically the same as they were 60 years ago but pilots have recently rediscovered how to squeeze extra performance with advanced engine monitors and adjusting air/oxygen mixture. A five-minute talk on how engines actually work, how they compare to car engines and how knowing what’s actually happening can squeeze extra efficiency out of this system, with a bias towards non-pilots who care about knowing the details of how everything in the world works.

2. Candace McNaughton, ND (Crescent Natural Health ) – Health Hacks

Natural medicine quick fixes. Eight simple solves for common issues. Candace McNaughton is a naturopath who specializes in diabetes and practices in Capitol Hill.

3. Bruce Leban (Google National Puzzlers’ League) – What I Learned in Prison

Yes, I spent time in not one but two Massachusetts prisons and it was an educational experience in many ways. Find out why I went to prison and if I would do it again. Learn about the differences between “minimum” and “medium” security and how this applies to computer security. Learn what “good time,” “man trap” and “code 100″ mean, why khaki pants were the required dress code, and other equally practical information. Don’t ask about the dogs.

As you can see it’s going to be eclectic night of life hacks, geekery and war stories.
Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The THIRD one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Thursday, April 5th. The Make Contest will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Videos and photos from the previous Ignite are available. Admission is free.

Join our mailing list! Jordan Schwartz, a speaker at our first Ignite (he gave the great talk on SMS services), pointed out that our mailing list is hidden on the site.  I’ll change that soon, but for now here’s a link to the sign-up page.

Bre and I use it to announce Ignite events & news. There’s no spam and almost no traffic.

We were lucky to have Hillel Cooperman (pictured) of Jackson Fish Market join us at Ignite Deux. He agreed to join the lineup the night before the event (thanks Hillel!) and gave an amazing presentation entitled “Life is Short: How to Make Every Meal an Opportunity for a Memorable Experience”. Hillel’s talk was based on his food blog Tasting Menu, one of the top food blogs in Seattle. A video of his talk and his slides will be available soon (at the same time as everyone else’s).

Here is a second update on the speaker list for Ignite Deux. Marc Hedlund of Wesabe and Radar was originally scheduled to speak at Ignite. He was not able to make it. He told me this well in advance and I just never made an announcement on the blog (sorry!). We hope that he will be able to make it to a future Ignite. (someone asked about this in the comments and I realized that I hadn’t made this announcement — sorry for the bait-n-switch.)
Update: I have removed this photo of Hillel Cooperman. I hadn’t checked the rights on the photo before posting (sloppy of me) and the photographer has asked that I remove it (well within his rights!) as he has them marked for non-commercial use only all-rights reserved. Sorry Michal!

We packed over 400 people into the CHAC last night to watch 32 Egg Slams and 22 talks. 20 eggs were broken and 436 slides were shown. Thanks to everyone who attended, volunteered, slammed, sponsored, and/or spoke.

The videos and presentations will be available for download shortly. In the meantime upload your photos to our Flickr Group.

We heard your feedback and we will have more room next time. We also have some ideas for how we can tighten up the program. If you have any feedback put it in the comments.

I just wanted to layout the night’s schedule again and make sure everyone knows the details:

5:00 – The space opens. There is WiFi, food (at Crave), and drink in the building. (We may ask you for help with set-up)
6:30 – Egg Slam begins!

8:30 – The Ask Later talks begin (See the schedule)

9:30 – Second Round of Ask Later talks

10:30 – Third Round of Ask Later talks.

And to re-iterate some things:

• Ignite is free.
• People under the age of eighteen are welcome until 10:00 PM.
• We are upstairs at the CHAC (a newly remodeled space). The space has room for ~400 people (we have no idea how many will be coming).
• There is a bar available.
• Bre and I can’t wait!

We have twenty-one awesome talks and speakers for you this time. The talks range in subject matter from tech to community to art to business and then back to tech with a little law and science thrown in. Each series of talks will begin at the bottom of the hour. Since the talks (should) last only 35 minutes (five x seven = thirty-five) there will be plenty of time for networking and socializing.Each talk is 20 slides long and each slide is on for only 15 seconds. If a topic bores you, go get a drink! Chances are it will be done by the time you get back.

First Set of Talks (8:30 PM)

1. Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Radar, Ignite!) – Greetings & Salutations
2. Matthew Maclaurin – (Microsoft Research) – Programming for Fun/Children/Hobbyists/Hackers
3. Elisabeth Freeman (Author in the Head First Series, Works at Disney Internet Group) -The Science Behind the Head First Books: or how to write a technical book that doesn’t put your readers to sleep
4. Scott Kveton (JanRain) – OpenID
5. Avi Geiger – “Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs” (Brady’s note – trust me this is going to be an eye-opening talk)
6. Ryan Stewart (ZDNet’s Universal Desktop; Threecast) – The Rich Internet Application Space: Everything from where AJAX fits to Apollo to WPF to the Flash Platform
7. Nancy White (Full Circle Associates) – What the Bleep is a Community Technology Steward?

Second Set of Talks (9:30 PM)

1. Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures)- Elevator Pitches and Parallel Entrepreneurship
2. Sarah Davies (Freedom For IP) – Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom
3. Lars Liden (Teachtown) – Utilizing Web Technology to Help Children with Autism
4. Kurt Brockett (Identity Mine) – A Look at Windows Presentation Foundation
5. Marcelo Calbucci (Sampa) – Dr. Watson for AJAX
6. Lee Lefever (The World Is Not Flat) – Adventures from a Year of Multimedia Travel Blogging: A few inspiring stories from a year of travel blogging across 29 countries that produced 500+ blog posts, 24 original videos and 14,000 photos.
7. Barry Brumitt (Google) – MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

Third Set of Talks (10:30 PM)

1. Ellie Lum (R.E.Load Bags) – “How R.E.Load Makes Their Bags”
2. Leo Dirac (Rhapsody) – Transhuman technology trends and their implications for a theory of morality
3. Deepak Singh (business|bytes|genes|molecules) – An Open Scientific Future
4. Mike Arcuri (Ontela) – Escaping the Empire: how to leave a big company
5. Heater Ralph – Art or science? A multi-person pogo stick
6. Jordan Mitchell (CEO, OthersOnline) – Distributed Social Networking and a New Metaphor for Search
7. Corprew Reed (American Society for Information Science & Technology) – What the heck is the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASIS&T?

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The next one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Tuesday, February 13th. The Make Contest (Egg Slam) will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Videos and photos from the previous Ignite are available. Admission is free.