Category: Ignite Seattle

Jordan, who gave the excellent talk on bees at the third Ignite has documented the honey harvesting process (I & II). It’s a fascinating read.

360 Flex is a Seattle developer conference. As they describe themselves:

360|Flex was the first all Flex/Apollo themed conference. Our inaugural conference in San Jose was a sell-out success. No doubt due to Adobe’s Flex Evangelist, Ted Patrick, helping to rally the community. This conference takes you into the nitty-gritty of Flex development. If you’re serious about Flex, then you need to attend this conference.

360|Flex is a community driven event. The sole purpose of the show is to bring the best of the Flex community together in one place to share war stories from the trenches and to allow the experts to share their deep technical knowledge to a large group. Another benefit is finally being able to put a face, voice and personality onto the bloggers, flexcoders and article writers that you’ve come to depend on.

Picnik, the awesome online photo-editor, is giving a way one pass to 360 Flex. The first Flex Developer to mail Picnik founder Mike Harringon gets it. Use mike at picnik dotcom.

We selected some talks to be done again at Gnomedex this morning. The video is streaming at http://chris.pirillo.com/live/

We go on at 11:30. We’ll see the following speakers again:

Make Art Not Content
Scotto Moore

Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!
Dave McClure

Stop Yelling, Start Weaving
Deborah Schultz

Is 2008 the year the “Third Screen” takes center stage?
Beth Goza

Venture Capital Term Sheets
Leo Dirac

An embarrassment of riches – the story of Noonhat
Brian Dorsey

LIFE: if you’re bored, you’re doing it wrong
Elan Lee

I’d like to thank all the attendees, volunteers, the CHAC, the people who promoted the event, and the speakers. It was an amazing event and it couldn’t have happened without you all.

As promised here are some of the links mentioned in presentations last night:

Noonhat – Changing the world through lunch

VC Term Sheets – Leo Dirac has put up his slides, but has judged that the spreadsheets aren’t ready to be shared yet. We’ll post them here when they are.

Jobs – in case you were interested both Ontela and Mifos are hiring.

Art Not Content – Before Scotto (in pic) started pondering the artist merits of LOLCats, he made a two season video series entitled “Cherub: The Vampire with Bunny Slippers“. I helped, but don’t hold that against it; it really is funny — especially if you are familiar with the Buffyverse.

Werewolf Rules – Here you go.

Thanks again!

(Photo credit: Stewtopia, stay-at-home-blogger)

If you want to be alerted about Ignite there are a couple of different ways.

1) Join the announcement list. Bre and I are the only people who post to it. It’s generally just alerts about upcoming events.

2) Follow us on Twitter. We are ignitesea. You can text “follow ignitesea” to 40404. Alternately, just go to the webpage.

3)  Subscribe to the blog via RSS. We’re going to start posting more about local tech events in case the periodically, quarterly ignite events aren’t enough for you.

Igntie got noticed by the Stranger. Woot! Maybe Dan Savage will give an Ignite talk next time. Their sight unseen description of the event is one of the best yet…

And while geeks also tend to be socially awkward, we still want them to kick some ass designing our software and answering difficult questions—but stop talking after a few minutes. Well, Ignite Seattle is a bi-monthly event for geeks to stand before a few hundred of us regular folk, share their esoteric brilliance, and then shut the fuck up. Tonight features 16 mercifully brief lectures, including the future of nanotechnology in healthcare and iPhone mind control. I haven’t been to an Ignite Seattle yet, but it draws up to 400 people and the full bar makes it sound a fuckload better than reading Wired.

I hope tonight’s show lives up to their high expectations. One note: we are more of a haphazardly quarterly event than bi-monthly.

Buster McLeod just sent out this email to all members of McLeods. To sum: The awesome tech art gallery needs help. Details below:

This is a difficult email to write, but we owe it to our members to be transparent about our situation. Simply put, McLeod Residence is in big trouble, as in financial trouble. The short story is, we’re running out of money. Our initial personal and angel investments are dwindling, and due to circumstances that have not allowed us to fully implement our business plan, our revenue hasn’t yet caught up to costs. McLeod Residence will have to close its doors unless we are able to raise a hefty amount of cash on the order of $40-$50,000 and quick.

Lele, Maggie, Chris and I began working on McLeod Residence since last October with a vision to bring art, technology, and collaboration together in a new way that Seattle had never seen. The gallery would feature art with a technological bent (a genre that is gaining momentum in Europe but has not found its niche in the US yet) and the lounge would provide a comfortable, friendly space for conversation and interaction. Most importantly, liquor sales would help us support more experimental art and artists, and allow us to take some risks as a gallery. The entire project has been centered on the idea of creating a supportive, engaging community for everyone. On many levels we’ve succeeded: In eight months we’ve welcomed 289 McLeod members, hosted many exciting events, shown innovative and exciting art, and received positive reviews in almost every major Seattle publication.

The space we have chosen to house McLeod Residence is 100 years old, and bringing it up to code so we can get a liquor license requires far more work than we were aware of when we signed the lease. The end is finally in sight: our latest submitted plans to the city are expected to be approved this week. During this process, however, we’ve drained our resources and no longer have the funds to make our drywall, plumbing and electricity code-compliant. Our survival is dependent on being able to perform this work so we can earn revenue by opening to the public as a lounge seven nights a week.

We have exhausted our other options. We do not have enough credit history to secure a loan or a credit line without a co-signer yet. We are now asking for your help in finding us new investors (perhaps in your own selves), because we a) desperately need it and b) know that you members believe in the project, and that asking for help is required before help can be found.

We are searching for people who would like to share in the ownership of our business.
Are you someone who can invest in the future of McLeod Residence on the order of $10-$50,000?
Do you know someone who can invest in the future of McLeod Residence on the order of $10-$50,000?
These two questions are by far the most important questions to answer in the affirmative during the next couple weeks if we want McLeod to survive. To give you some numbers to consider, $10,000 buys you 4% of McLeod, $20,000 buys you 8%, etc. We currently have 711 outstanding shares (71.1% of McLeod currently split between Lele and I) and are looking to sell up to 500 of the remaining shares.  We have papers all set up, and can walk any interested parties through the details.

We are confident that once we get around this permitting obstacle, McLeod Residence will be great in its success.

If you cannot help in terms of investment, please let us know if you can help in other ways.  We know that you believe in us, and your help would be greatly appreciated.  Can you upgrade your membership, bring in new members, purchase the art you’ve been wanting, or host events that help raise money?  Please let us know your ideas.   If you need any more information or have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask either Lele or myself.

Finally… rest assured!

Whatever happens, McLeod and our vision will continue. We know that each of you has invested a part of yourself in this project (monetarily, creatively, through yearly and lifetime memberships, etc) and whether we stay in this particular space, or become a transient project while we plot to resurrect in a new form, we will not simply close up shop and forget about the momentum that has been created here. All of us are in this for the long term.

Sincerely,
Buster McLeod & Lele McLeod & company

McLeod Residence

Biznik is going to sponsor Ignite for the first time. Thanks Biznik!

Biznik is a business-building social network for independent professionals with 2,500 members in Seattle. Find other entrepreneurs interested in collaborating or forming groups, or jump into a discussion on a topic that interests you. Discover what people just like you have learned and avoid the pitfalls of starting a business. The Biznik events calendar currently features more than a dozen educational and networking events each month in the Seattle area, all hosted by members. Biznik is an open network with free basic membership, supported by two paid levels that feature enhanced profiles and visibility. Learn more at http://biznik.com.

Member benefits: Increased visibility for your business (try Googling “Seattle rails hosting,” and you’ll see how powerful Biznik SEO is for members who want traffic to their business). Education (all events are hosted by members, for members, on a variety of topics relevant to small business). Community (active discussions on a wide variety of topics of interest to entrepreneurs and small business owners, as well as happy hours for meeting face-to-face).

Adobe is sponsoring Ignite for the first time to promote AIR. Thanks Adobe!

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

Ontela is sponsoring Ignite again! Thanks guys!
Ontela is a venture-backed startup that makes it ridiculously easy to get pictures from your camera phone to your PC. We just raised a bunch of money so we could hire smart, creative people JUST LIKE YOU — see our web site for job openings!