Category: Ignite Seattle

Light: A Benefit for the Darfur Wall

Ignite Alum and a founder of the Darfur Wall Jonah Burke alerted me to an upcoming benefit in Seattle. Here are the details:

LIGHT
A Benefit for Darfur

This March, DJ Darek Mazzone, DJ Rhythma, and special guest DJ Starterkit will be dropping the hottest global beats to help stop the cold-blooded crisis in Darfur.  Join us for this night of unchecked revelry.  All proceeds benefit The Darfur Wall.

The Baltic Room
Saturday, March 3
10:00 p.m.

More info and RSVP (optional): http://darfurwall.org/party

Egg Breaking!

Update: I’ll be testing firing contraptions this week, wait to build your egg drop safety container until after Friday so that you can see the firing contraption in the podcast. Rules may change at that time to accomadate something like a giant crossbow!67397804 D7271E40Cd

On February 13th, Brady and I will be hosting Ignite Seattle, a Maker/Geek event here in Seattle. We’re going to be having an egg drop. You make an egg-safety device that is smaller than an 18″ x 18″ x 18″ cube and less than 3 pounds. You bring it to the event at 6:30 PM at the CHAC upper level on February 13th and we’ll put it in a giant slingshot and smash it against the wall. If you’ve done an egg drop event and have any advice for me, drop me a note in the comments!

You can make your own egg safety container on your own time or since you can come and work on your design as early as 4:30 if you want. I’ll have popsicle sticks, hot glue, and newspaper there for you to make your own. If you have any other ideas for supplies to have there, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. No matter what, all building stops at 7:30 so that we can put the eggs into a giant sling shot made of a lot of surgical tubing and fire them at a (plastic protected) brick wall. No metal or glass allowed since we don’t want to break the place.

Did you do an egg drop in school or have a brilliant idea for an egg cushioning device? If so, you can help out by uploading a picture of your cushioning strategy or drawing a diagram and upload it to the MAKE: flickr pool. I’ll be putting some of these pictures in the Weekend Project podcast this weekend which will be all about egg drops and I may even try and use one of the uploaded strategies.

What is an Egg Drop? – Link

Talks: Content Sharing, Data Processing, Helping Kids, Going Small, and Transhuman Morality

Announcing these talks is fun; we’ve got a wonderful range this time. Don’t worry there’s more to come — and don’t forget that the deadline for submissions is Wednesday. Here are the speakers and their talks’ titles:

  1. Sarah Davies (Freedom For IP) – Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom
    • Abstract: Patent and copyright systems were created in times when production was expensive. Incentive was needed for creators to bring their products to market. A dangerous trend has emerged since that time. As the cost of production has gone down, the incentive to create has gone up. This has created a culture in which large corporations are locking up culture and innovation, in which people buy portfolios of patents for the sole purpose of litigating against anyone who tries to bring them to market. The GPL and Creative Commons have been devised to mitigate the damage that this trend is causing to our society, and we must decide as a society how they should be crafted.
  2. Barry Brumitt (Google) – MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters [Brady: Powerful tech. Learn more ahead of time.]
  3. Lars Liden (Teachtown) – Utilizing Web Technology to Help Children with Autism
    • Abstract: Autism, a severe brain disorder that begins in early childhood, has grown from a relatively rare condition to one that affects one in 166 births. Treatment usually consists of hands-on time with a team of clinicians, teachers and therapy assistants using printed materials such as flashcards and time consuming generation of reports created by hand. Furthermore, coordination of therapy is usually done through physically passing binders of information back and forth between team members. This talk will demonstrate how a web enabled treatment system can connect members of a child’s team, making sure everyone on the team is up to date on their latest progress, and automatically tracking and sharing data and notes between team members. This allows for a substantially more effective treatment program. Among other novel approaches, the concept of e-mail is flipped on it’s head, so instead of team members mailing each other individually, authored notes are attached to the child and given context (such as which lesson they relate to). The talk will also touch on the use of artificial intelligence for tailoring the curriculum for individual students.
  4. Mike Arcuri (Ontela) – Escaping the Empire: how to leave a big company
  5. Leo Dirac (Rhapsody) – Transhuman technology trends and their implications for a theory of morality

The first two sets of announced talks included

Identity, Pitches, Bouncing, Analyzing AJAX, and Rich Internet Applications

and

Applied Privacy, Power, Neuroscience, Custom Bags, and World Travel

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 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.

Talks: Identity, Pitches, Bouncing, Analyzing AJAX, and Rich Internet Applications

Those are the next five topics selected for the next Ignite (2/13). I am still selecting talks, but we now have a total of 10 talks.

  1. Scott Kveton (JanRain) – OpenID
  2. Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures)- The Art of the Elevator Pitch – how to pitch your tech startup in 30 seconds or less
  3. Heater Ralph – Art or science? A multi-person pogo stick
  4. Marcelo Calbucci (Sampa) – Dr. Watson for AJAX
  5. 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

The rest of the talks will revealed next week!

Applied Privacy, Power, Neuroscience, Custom Bags, and World Travel

Those are the first five topics selected for the next Ignite (2/13). I’ve been busy going through the submissions, but I would like to announce the first five speakers: for the Ask Later talks:

  1. Marc Hedlund (Wesabe) – “Five Ways to Actually Provide Privacy in a Web Application.”
  2. Avi Geiger – “Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs” (Brady’s note – trust me this is going to be an eye-opening talk)
  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. Ellie Romero (R.E.Load Bags) – “How R.E.Load Makes Their Bags”
  5. 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.

The topics span tech, DIY, life hacks and (in future, to-be-accepted talks) entrepreneurship. More speakers will be announced in the coming days.

Wanna submit a talk? The final speakers won’t be selected until the submission deadline of 2/7 — next Wednesday. Take a look at the guidelines.

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 will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Admission is free.

CHAC Upper Level

We maxed out the lower level of CHAC last time we were there. While we weren’t looking, CHAC went and renovated the space upstairs into a massive awesome space that’ll be perfect for Ignite Seattle!

Getting Ready For Ignite Seattle

We stopped into to take a peek and a rock band was setting up.

Getting Ready For Ignite Seattle

They’ve made a bar that we’ll have all to ourselves! Mmmm, drinks!
So you should remember that it’s at the same location and still free, but upstairs instead of downstairs!

Ignite Seattle Deux (that means 2 in fancy-talk)

February 13th, 2007 6:30 – 11:00

CHAC Upper Level (MAP)

621 12th Ave

Seattle, WA 98122 (206) 388-0521

Ask Later Videos Posted

We had 25 speakers at the first Ignite. Bryan Zug was kind enough to record and edit all 25 talks. All of the talks can be found on the Ignite Seattle page on Blip.Tv.

All of the talks were great, but some really come through well on video. I recommend that you check out:

You can also download all of the talks from our S3 account, sponsored by Amazon Webservices. Grab the Torrent or download the Zip file.
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Next Ignite: 2/13 at the CHAC

ignitecrowd

Ignite Crowd Photo from PDGibson

Bre and I have plotted with the owners of the CHAC to schedule another Ignite! We know that we need more space. We know that we need to keep the energy alive. We know that we need to top the last event. We know that we need to keep the bar nearby. We’re going to do all of those things and more…

The next Ignite is scheduled for… February 13th upstairs at the CHAC. The upstairs is huge and will be freshly renovated. It has high ceilings with lots of room for things to fly though the air.

Admission will be free. The format will be the same. The top-secret Make event will begin at 6:30 and go til 8:00. The Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30 and continue for three rounds with frequent breaks.

Start thinking now if you want to do an Ask Later talk. I’ll do a call for submissions in January.

We’ll give you one hint for Bre’s Make event: You’ll have to figure out how to save your chickens before they hatch.

Brady & Bre

PS – RSVP at Upcoming if you like