A Cat Cafe is a place to buy yummy drinks and pay for time in a room of carefully selected cats. There is a huge boom of cat cafes in the world right now! The USA has yet to open a single one but three are trying in California while there is also 1 in Denver. Lets beat them all!
About McRae
McRae Naayers is a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University and is currently busy planning the opening of Kitty Kafe in the U District. You can find out more about the Kitty Kafe at their site Seattle Kitty Kafe and on their Facebook page here.
When I was a kid, I discovered I had a superpower–something I could do better than everyone around me. It got me scholarships for college, launched me into my dream career as a diplomat, and gave me my place in society. I felt like a superhero everywhere I went–from Afghanistan to Russia to Washington, DC–until I moved back to Seattle last year.
A motto of my talk show is to fact check everything, in order to become a better consumer of news. I’ll go over how the media cherry picks data to fuel a specific narrative they want consumers to believe. I’ll use examples that challenge our ideological beliefs to show the audience how they’re being manipulated by the media.
About Jason
Jason Rantz is host of the Jason Rantz Show on KIRO Radio weeknights 7-10pm. You can find his tweets @jasonrantz
You’ve probably heard plenty of fear and loathing about drones – especially anything to do with government, law enforcement, and foreign policy.
I’ve got a different take. Amazing things are starting to take shape with a host of human-scale flying robots. I’d like to introduce you to what farmers, surfers, realtors, brides-to-be, and a host of other everyday people are already realizing: “the internet of things” sometimes requires propellers – and incredible patience.
About Matt
Matt Shobe is a serial entrepreneur who most recently co-founded Spare5. You can find him on his personal blog, MatthewShobe.com and on Twitter @shobe.
And we’re back! Ignite Seattle 25 is just a few weeks away on Tuesday, October 7 at Seattle Town Hall. The fun starts at 8 p.m., but doors open early so you can get a drink and chat it up. Thanks to everyone who submitted! Here are our 16 speakers:
Ignite Seattle is back with out 24th show on Thursday May 22nd at Town Hall. Buy tickets now ($5) to reserve your place.
Doors open at 7pm (as does the bar) and talks start at 8pm. This is our list of speakers, though not necessarily in the order they are speaking (we choose the order using a just in time algorithm involving big data, tea leaves and stray cats). There will be, as always, a glorious intermission half way through the program for more drinking, snacking and chatting (or dancing if you are so inclined).
Change ALL the passwords (without pain, misery and suffering), Arcadiy Kantor
Your Diet Will Fail (And Why Mine Eventually Will), Dylan Wilbanks
Nightclub Bartending and Middle School Teaching: A Venn Diagram, Kristin Leong
We do everything we can to select speakers with great topics and passions, but we also work hard to help them prepare.
As the Ignite Seattle speaker coach I run a session where we talk about common mistakes, tactics for preparing and how to develop a great story. It’s informal, fun and we usually feed people (hungry speakers are bad speakers). We also encourage folks to do a dry run improvisation with us to get feedback early on in their process. And of course speakers at Ignite are interesting folks and the session is a chance for them to get to know each other.
We tell speakers that since they’re speaking about something they know well and are passionate about, they could probably spend time thinking carefully about 4 or 5 stories or messages and simply practice and present that, without any slides, and do fine. We strongly recommend people develop their ideas, points and stories before they make a single slide. What you say and how you say it is by far the most important thing.
Here are the slides I use that covers the basic advice, including showing speakers photos of the stage and what to expect once they’re up there.
But others have written advice on preparing for Ignite. There is no right way to prepare of course and the ends are far more important than the means<
Ignite Seattle 22 is next Wednesday, November 20th at Town Hall. You can buy tickets now to reserve your place. This is our list of speakers, though not neceassarily in the order they are speaking.
Steve Roth – Five Things You Don’t Know About Hamlet Mandy Sorensen (@mandercrosby) – Superbugs: It’s What’s for Dinner. Manuhuia Barcham – What Do You Mean the Culture is Different Here?!? Lewis Lin (Lewis_Lin) – Negotiate Like an Angry Bride Michael Grabham (@survivestreets) – Hey Mister, Can You Spare a Dime?
Paul Shoemaker (@paulshoeSVP) – Hacking Social Good: 3 Questions to Unlock Your Potential Molly Bullard (@seattlephotoorg) – How to Tame Your Digital Photos Hanne Ockert-Axelsson (@hanneoa) – Revolutionary Compassion Christine Klimkowski (@c_klimkowski) – Ship That Matters David Hoang (@davidhoang) – Coast-to-Coast: How to Live in Two Cities Shannon Houghton (@MsHoughton) – We Need Math Pushers
Jeris JC Miller (@dakini_3) – Adventures with Google Glass Darcy Burner (@DarcyBurner) – The Protest Algorithm Sarah Schacht (@Sarahschacht) – I Got E. Coli so You Don’t Have To; How Open Data and Usability Can Prevent Food Poisoning Shango Los (@VIMEA_grows) – Embrace Your Local Pot Farmer Cristina McAllister (kinabutterjelly) – Reject to Lab Tech
Ignite Seattle is a special event, with one of the largest (800+) and most engaged storytelling audiences you will find in our city. We take open submissions for talk ideas and want to help you to pitch us well. This post explains the best possible advice for getting your talk accepted.
Talks are strictly 5 minutes long with automated slides. You can speak about anything, but all talks must consist of 20 slides, each timed to be on screen for 15 seconds, for a total of 5 minutes (Similar to Pecha-Kucha). It’s an exciting and dynamic format and if you’ve never seen an Ignite talk, watch some. Don’t worry too much about slides; it’s you and your story or lessons that matter most. We will coach you.
There are only 10 slots / we average 60 submissions. This means far more people are rejected than accepted. This is competitive, so bring your best. Show your draft to friends and get their feedback. But don’t take it personally if you’re rejected – these slots are precious.
The organizers meet to vote on who gets accepted. We review all submissions, mostly blind except for the title and description, with a short window of time for discussing each submission. We quickly filter out poorly written, under-thought or vague ones.
It’s a show, not just a set of talks. Talks get accepted or rejected based in part on how they fit together to make a great evening for our audience. For example, you might have a great proposal for a talk about How to make Swiss Cheese, but it just happens to collide with three other cheese-making submissions and we can’t have all of them in the same evening. It’s OK to resubmit talks to future Ignites.
Your submission will be reviewed in a mostly blind spreadsheet (shown below). We hide your name and identity to help reduce our bias. Submissions that are concise, clear and compelling tend to do best, as the Ignite format itself hinges on getting to the heart of things quickly.
We’re very open minded about what approach you want to take, but to help you get started there are four kinds of talks we often see.
Personal story. This is where you share a life experience you had that was profound, interesting, exotic, powerful, or funny in some way that is relatable to other people. Keep in mind that there is a difference between something that was interesting for you (“I won the lottery”) and making it interesting for the audience (“Here are things that will surprise you about winning the lottery”). Good storytelling is about making your experience relatable or interesting to others. See I Fix Evything or A Transgender Band walks into a Rural Town.
Reporting on an interest project. Maybe you built something unusual, went on a special trip, or are part of a volunteer organization that does good work. Your talk can be reporting on those experiences and inviting the audience to learn from, or be entertained by, them. See Cats, Rats, AI, Oh My! or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
A combination of the above or something new. There are countless ways to combine these different talk forms so don’t feel limited to picking one. However most talks to tend to go more strongly down one of these paths than another. And we do love challenges and interesting concepts that don’t quite fit: live performances (we’ve had acrobats, jugglers and musicians), fictional narratives or something we’ve never even heard of before but sounds like our audience would appreciate.
Invest in a great title
Spend the time necessary to come up with a great title. By showing you can name your talk something short, informative, compelling and perhaps funny, you prove you’re worthy of a slot on our stage. Ignite is about concision. Show us you’re good at keeping it short. By working hard on the title I promise you, the talk itself will improve.
When the organizers meet to review submissions, we look at a giant spreadsheet of the submission data (see below). It’s overwhelming. An easy way to cut through the noise is to give us a strong quality signal in your title.
Good titles distill big ideas into a single, easy to evaluate sentence. We read the descriptions of course, but nothing gives us more confidence in you than your title.
Good titles from past Ignites include:
SCRUM management for wedding planning
Fighting Dirty in Scrabble
Hacking Birth
Commut-A-Pult
Build your own Standing Desk
Welcome to the Psych Ward
What cities can learn from Burning Man
How Science is Destroying My Childhood
These titles express an interesting angle on a topic. These angle choices can make a seemingly boring topic suddenly fascinating. It’s easy to imagine what the talks will contain, and even when it’s hard to imagine, they are compelling enough that we’d want to find out.
As opposed to failed topic submissions like these:
Why I don’t mind Subway sandwiches
Ten ways to do something even I don’t care about
How web 8.0 disruption widgets will bore the world to tears
I’m passionate about “things” but too lazy to think carefully about my message or what I want to say so I’ll submit things I haven’t really thought about or distilled down and make everyone sad
Get us interested, but don’t be vague
A good title is 50% of your proposal, but a good description is the other 50%. A great proposal description balances our need to understand your story with the need to be concise. If you’re accepted, we can be mysterious and vague when we promote your talk, but please don’t be mysterious and vague with us. If you have 3 points to tell the audience, tell us what they are.
Descriptions are limited to about 100 words. You don’t need to detail every point in your talk, but don’t leave us wondering what you’ll be talking about.
A good example:
Title: How To Not Be The Slowest Gazelle On The Internet Description: The slowest gazelle gets eaten by the lion. In the world of cybersecurity, you are probably one of the slowest gazelle. Unless you’re a movie star, a CEO, or a politician, you probably don’t need to be in the front of the pack. Just safely in the middle.
Luckily – it’s real easy to get to the middle of the pack. There is ONE thing you can do that will drastically enhance your personal security and safety on the internet – and that’s using complicated, unique passwords on every account and saving them with a password manager. Many people give advice. But I will tell you the secret to actually getting it done: identify the most important accounts and do those first.
A bad example:
Title: How A Cafe Changed My Life Description: There was a time once when I had to make a tough decision, but couldn’t decide what to do. I went to a cafe and ordered some toast with butter. While I ate it I came to an incredible realization about my quandary. As I crunched on that last bite of toast, I realized what I needed to do. And that realization set into motion a series of events that changed my life. That cafe changed my life, the lessons I learned my work for you too.
Share your passion on any topic
There are no restrictions on your choice of topic. If we’re convinced you’re telling a great story, any topic goes. Over the years we’ve had one armed jugglers, street musicians and some dramatic personal stories that would be appropriate for The Moth or This American Life (if they were on speed). We’ve had topics that range from video games to Ultimate Frisbee, eating bugs to how to write a song, and once even had two speakers get married on stage (in 5 minutes).
We expect three things from you regarding topics:
You’re passionate about it
You’re knowledgeable (enough that you know more than most of the audience)
You’ll share that passion and knowledge in ways the audience can connect with
And regarding content and requirements:
Avoid cliches in your title and description. Sharing what you learned from an experience is great, but try to avoid the phrase “life lessons.”
It’s okay not to have a takeaway from the talk. We’re not TED, and not every talk has to be actionable.
Don’t feel like you need to be a professional speaker or be a leading expert in a world-changing topic to qualify to speak. We want proposals from normal, everyday people.
Don’t pitch your business
Talks pitching your product, startup or consulting business will be automatically rejected. Don’t even try. We’ve made this mistake in the past and everyone in the audience knows in 10 seconds what you’re doing and they will hate you for it, and us for letting you on stage.
We do want you to promote yourself, but solely as someone who has given a great Ignite talk. It’s ok to tell your story provided it’s not centered on selling something. We have had speakers talk about something they invented or how they started a company (Rich Johnston from Vertical World) or a non-profit organization, but the focus was on the lessons and stories, rather than promoting anything. Think of your talk as a self-contained creation, and not a tool for some other purpose.
A good example of balancing self-promotion with giving an excellent talk is I Stalk Strangers Online (great title) by Carmen Hudson. Her talk was about her job as a tech headhunter and she successfully focused on sharing secrets and insider knowledge – it never felt like she was pitching her services, since she wasn’t. But here I am talking about her and her excellent talk (see how this works?)
Ignite Seattle 